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T. B. MACAULAY, 



Scenes and Characters 

FROM 

THE WRITINGS OF 

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, 

BEINC A SELECTION OF 

J^is ^ost ^Eloquent 33assafles, 

CONTAINING SKETCHES OF 

ASSISOM, MArAME D'ARBLAY, BACON, BARERE, BOSWELL, BTJRKE, BOILEATT» 
BYRON, CHATHAJI, LORD CLIVE, CONGREVE, CRISP, DANTE, DRYDEN, FOX, 
FREDERICK THE GREAT, GARRICK, EARL GREY, GEORGE II., WARRBM 
HASTINGS, JOHNSON, IGNATIUS LOYOLA, MILTON, SIR JAMEg 
MACKINTOSH, MICHIAVELLI, MIRABEAU, POPE, SWIFT, SHERI- 
DAN, SIR WILLIAM TE^IPLE, VOLTAIRE, WALPOLK, 

And other eminent individuals. 

TO ■WHICH IS PREFIXED 

A SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOU: 

BY B. H, HORNE, ESQ. 



NEW-YORK: 

TURNER & HAYDEN, 10 JOHN STREET ; 

H. & E. PHINNEY, COOPERSTOWN j 

I. TIFFANY, UTICA; 

C. MORSE, DETROIT. 

184«. 



T^'^^^ 



Gift • 
Mrs. Hennen Jennings 
April 26, 1933 



CONTENTS 



rASK. 



Sketch of the Author, . , , . , 7 

Milton's Poetry, jl 

The Creations of iEschylus, 12 

Miiton and Dante, 13 

Character of the Puritans, 16 

Milton, 20 

Machiavelli, 22 

Dryden, 25 

Empire of the Caesars, 32 

The Reformation, 35 

Times of George II., 36 

Burke, 39 

Byron, , 40 

Boswell's Life of Johnson, 42 

Earl of Chatham, 49 

Sir James Mackintosh, 52 

Sir William Temple, ""55 

The Roman Catholic Church, '56 

Policy of the Church of England, 62 

Protestantism and Catholicism, 65 

Lord Clive,— a Boy, 67 

Lord CHve, — a Man, 68 

Decline of the Empire of Tamerlane, 69 

The late Lord Holland, 73 

Trial of Warren Hastings, 81 

Warren Hastings, -, 88 

Father of Frederic the Great, 90 



IV. CONTENTS. 

PAOK 

Frederick the Great, '.. 91 

Voltaire, 97 

Anecdote of Garrick, ... | .... 105 

Mr. Samuel Crisp, 105 

Miss Bumey, (Madame D'Arblay,) 112 

Addison's Visit to Boileau, 118 

Origin of Addison's " Cato," 122 

Character of Addison, 123 

Anecdotes of Steele, 127 

Addison's Humor, 129 

Addison's " Spectator," 133 

Addison and Swift, 136 

One Phase of the Character of Pope, 139 

Character of Barere, 140 

Fall of the Girondists, 143 

Character of the Terrorists, 144 

Farewell to Barere, 146 

Jeremy Bentham, 155 

The French Legislature during the Revolution, 158 

Louis the Fourteenth, 161 

Horace Walpole, 163 

Francis Bacon, 173 

Congreve, the Dramatist, 1 77 

Character of the Bengalees, 183 

Sir Philip Francis, (Junius,) 185 

Hyder Ali, 189 

Mr. Burke and Warren Hastings, 191 

Archbishop Laud and Earl Strafford, 196 

Death of Hampden, 200 

Nares' Memoirs of Lord Burghley, 204 

The Elder Mr. Pitt in Parliament, 208 



SKETCH OF T. B. MACAULAY. 



Thomas Babington Macaulay is the son of 
Zachary Macaulay, well known as^the friend of 
Wilberforce, and, though himself an African mer- 
chant, one of the most ardent abolitionists of slavery. 
In 1S18, T. B. Macaulay became a member of 
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his 
Bachelor's deo-ree in 1822. He distinoruished him- 

o o 

self as a student, having obtained a scholarship, 
twice gained the Chancellor's medal for English 
verse, and also gained the second Craven Scholar- 
ship, the highest honor in classics which the Uni- 
versity confers. Owing to his dislike of mathematics, 
he did not compete for honors at graduation, but 
nevertheless he obtained a Fellowship at the Octo- 
ber competition open to graduates of Trinity, which 
he appears to have resigned before his subsequent 
departure for India. He devoted much of his time 
to the " Union" Debating Society, where he was 
reckoned an eloquent speaker. 

Mr. Macaulay studied at Lincoln's Inn, and was 
called to the bar in 1826. In the same year hia 



8 SKETCH OF T. B. MAGAULAY. 

** Essay on Milton" appeared in the "Edinburgh 
Review ;" and out of Lord (then Mr.) Jeffrey's 
admiration of that paper, arose an intimate friend- 
ship. Macaulay, visiting Scotland soon afterward, 
went the circuit with Mr. Jeffrey. His connection 
with the ** Edinburgh Review" has continued at 
intervals ever since. 

By the Whig administration Mr. Macaulay was 
appointed Commissioner of Bankrupts. He com- 
menced his parliamentary career about the same 
period, as member for Colne in the reform Parlia- 
ment of 1832, and again for Leeds in 1834, at which 
time he was secretary to the India Board. His seat 
was, however, soon relinquished, for in the same 
year he was appointed member of the Supreme 
Council in Calcutta, under the East India Compa- 
ny's new charter. 

Arriving in Calcutta, in September, 1834, Mr. 
Macaulay shortly assumed an important trust in 
addition to his seat at the Council. At the request 
of the Governor-general, Lord William Bentinck, 
he became President of the commission of five, 
appointed to frame a penal code for India; and the 
principal provisions of this code have been attributed 
to him. One of its enactments, in particular, was 
fio unpopular among the English inhabitants, as to 



SKii^TCH OF T. B. MACAULAY. Vl 

receive the appellation of the " Black Act." It 
abolished the right of appeal from the Local Courts 
to the Supreme Court at the Presidency, hitherto 
exclusively enjoyed by Europeans, and put them on 
the same footing v^^ith natives, giving to both an 
equal right of appeal to the highest Provincial 
Courts. Inconvenience and delay of justice had 
been caused by the original practice, even when 
India was closed against Europeans in general, but 
such practice was obviously incompatible vvdth the 
rights and property of the natives under the new 
system of opening the country to general resort. 
This measure of equal justice, however, exposed 
Mr. Macaulay, to whom it was universally attributed, 
to outrageous personal attacks in letters, pamphlets, 
and at public meetings. 

The various reforms and changes instituted by 
Lord W. Bentinck and Lord Auckland, were advo- 
cated in general by Mr. Macaulay. He returned 
to England in 1838. 

Mr. Macaulay was elected member for Edinburgh 
on the liberal interest in 1839 ; and being appointed 
Secretary at War, he was re-elected the following 
year, and again at the general election in 1841. 
No review of his political career is here intended ; 
although in relation to literature, it should b» men- 



10 SKETCH OF T. B. MACAULAT. 

tioned that he opposed Mr. Serjeant Talfourd's 
Copyright Bill, and was the principal agent in de- 
feating it. As a public speaker, he usually displays 
extensive information, close reasoning, and elo- 
quence; and has recently bid fair to rival the 
greatest names among our English orators. Hia 
conversation in private is equally brilliant and 
instructive. 

Mr. Macaulay may fairly be regarded as the first 
critical and historical essayist of the time. It is not 
meant to be inferred that there are not other writers 
who display as much understanding and research, 
as great, perhaps greater capacity of appreciating 
excellence, as much acuteness and humor, and a 
more subtle power of exciting, or of measuring, the 
efforts of the intellect and the imagination, besides 
possessing an equal mastery of language in their 
own peculiar style ; but there is no other writer 
who combines so large an amount of all those qual- 
ities, with the addition of a mastery of style, at once 
highly classical and most extensively popular. His 
style is classical, because it is so correct ; and it is 
popular because it must be intelligible without effort 
to every educated understanding. 



MACAULAY'S MISCELLANIES. 



MILTON'S POETRY. 

The most striking characteristic of the poetry of 
Milton is the extreme remoteness of the associations, 
by means of which it acts on the reader. Its effect 
is produced, not so much by what it expresses, as 
by what it suggests, not so much by the ideas which 
it directly conveys, as by other ideas which are 
connected with them. He electrifies the mind 
through conductors. The most unimaginative man 
must vmderstand the Iliad. Homer gives him no 
choice, and requires from him no exertion ; but 
takes the whole upon himself, and sets his images 
in so clear a light that it is impossible to be blind to 
them. The works of Milton cannot be comprehend- 
ed or enjoyed, unless the mind of the reader co- 
operate with that of'the writer. He does not paint 
a finished picture, or play for a mere passive listen- 
er. He sketches, and leaves others to fill up the 
outline. He strikes the key-note, and expects his 
hearer to make out the melody. • 

We often hear of the magical influence of poetry. 
The expression in general means nothing; but, 
applied to the writings of Milton, it is most appro- 
priate. His poetry acts like an incantation. Its 
merit lies less in its obvious meaning than in its 
occult power. There would seem, at first sight, to 
be no more in his words than in other words. But 



12 macaulay's miscellanies. 

they are words of enchantment ; no sooner are they 
pronounced than the past is present, and the distant 
near. New forms of beauty start at once into exist- 
ence, and all the burial places of the memory give 
up tbeir dead. Cliange the structure of the sen- 
tence, substitute one synonyme for another, and the 
whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; 
and he who should then hope to conjure with it, 
would fmd himself as much mistaken as Cassim in 
the Arabian tale, when he stood crying, **Open 
Wheat," " Open Barley," to the door which obeyed 
no sound but " Open Sesame !" The miserable 
failure of Dryden, in his attempt to rewrite some 
parts of the Paradise Lost, is a remarkable instance 
of this. 

THE CPvEATIONS OF iESCHYLUS. 

His favorite gods are those of the elder genera- 
tions, — the sons of heaven and earth, compared with 
whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and an up- 
start — the gigantic Titans and the inexorable Furies. 
Foremost among his creations of this class stands 
Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, the friend of 
man, the sullen and implacable enemy of heaven. 
He bears undoubtedly a considerable resemblance 
to the Satan of Milton. In both we find the same 
impatience of control, the same ferocity, the same 
unconquerable pride. In both characters also are 
mingled, though in very different proportions, some 
kind and generous feelings. Prometheus, however, 
is hardly superhuman enough. He talks too much 
of his chains and his uneasy posture. He is rather 



*• MILTON AND DANTE. 13 

too mucli depressed and agitated. His resolution 
seems to depend on the knowledge which he pos- 
sesses, that he holds the fate of his torturer in his 
hands, and that the hour of his release will surely 
come. But Satan is a creature of another sphere. 
The might of his intellectual nature is victorious 
over the extremity of pain. Amid agonies which 
cannot be conceived without horror, he deliberates, 
resolves, and even exults. Against the sword of 
Michael, against the thunder of Jehovah, aQ:ainsfe 
the flaming lake and the marl burning with solid 
fire, against the prospect of an eternity of uninter- 
mitteut misery, his spirit bears up unbroken, resting 
on its own innate energies, requiring no support 
from anything external, nor even from hope itself! 

MILTON AND DANTE. 

The character of Milton was peculiarly distin- 
guished by loftiness of thought; that of Dante by 
intensity of feeling. In every line of the Divine 
Comedy we discern the asperity which is produced 
by pride struggling with misery. There is perhaps 
no work in the world so deeply and uniformly sor- 
rowful. The melancholy of Dante was no fantastic 
caprice. It was not, as far as at this distance of 
time can be judged, the effect of external circum- 
stances. It was from within. Neither love nor 
glory, neither the conflicts of the earth nor the hope 
of heaven could dispel it. It twined every consola- 
tion and every pleasure into its own nature. It 
resembled that noxious Sardinian soil of which the 
intense bitterness is said to have been perceptible 



14 macaulay's miscellanies. 

even in its honey. His mind was, in the noble lan- 
guage of the Hebrew poet, *' a land of darkness, as 
darkness itself, and where the light was as dark- 
ness !" The gloom of his character discolors all the 
passions of men and all the face of nature, and 
tinges with it§ own lived hue the flowers of Para- 
dise and the glories of the Eternal Throne ! All 
the portraits of him are singularly characteristic. 
No person can look on the features, noble even to 
ruggedness, the dark furrows of the cheek, the 
haggard and woful stare of the eye, the sullen and 
contemptuous curve of the lip, and doubt that they 
belonged to a man too proud and too sensitive to be 
happy. 

Milton was, like Dante, a statesman and a lover — 
and, like Dante, he had been unfortunate in ambi- 
tion and in love. He had survived his health and 
his sight, the comforts of his home, and the prosper- 
ity of his party. Of the great men, by whom he 
had been distinguished at his entrance into life, 
some had been taken away from the evil to come ; 
some had carried into foreign climates their uncon- 
querable hatred of oppression; some were pining 
in dungeons ; and some had poured forth their 
blood on scaffolds. That hateful proscription, face- 
tiously termed the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion,' 
had set a mark on the poor, blind, deserted poet, 
and held him up by name to the hatred of a profli- 
gate court and an inconstant people ! Venial and 
licentious scribblers, with just sufficient talent to 
clothe the thoughts of a pander in the style of a 
bellman, were now the favorite writers of the sove- 
reign and the public. It was a loathsome herd— 



MILTON AND DANTE. 15 

which could be compared to nothing so fitly as to 
the rabble of Comus, grotesque monsters, half 
bestial, half human, dropping with wine, bloated 
with gluttony, and reehng in obscene dances. 
Amid these his Muse was placed, like the chaste 
lady of the Masque, lofty, spotless and serene — to 
be chattered at, and pointed at, and grinned at, by 
the whole rabble of Satyrs and Goblins. If ever 
despondency and asperity could be excused in any 
man, it might have been excused in MlUon. But 
the strength of his mind overcame every calamity. 
Neither blindness, nor gout, nor age, nor penury, 
nor domestic afflictions, nor political disappoint- 
ments, nor abuse, nor proscription, nor neglect, had 
power to disturb his sedate and majestic patience. 
His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they 
were singularly equable. His temper was serious, 
perhaps stern ; but it was a temper which no suffer- 
ings could render sullen or fretful. Such as it was, 
when, on the eve of great events, he returned from 
his travels, in the prime of health and manly beauty, 
loaded with literary distinctions, and glowing with 
patriotic hopes, such it continued to be — when, 
after having experienced every calamity which is 
incident to our nature, old, poor, sightless, and dis- 
graced, he retired to his hovel to die ! 

Hence it was, that though he wrote the Paradise 
Lost at a time of life when images of beauty and 
tenderness are in general beginning to fade, even 
from those minds in which they have not been 
effaced by anxiety and disappointment, he adorned 
it with all that is most lovely and delightful in the 
physical and in the moral world. Neither Theo- 



16 macaulay's miscellanies. 

critus nor Ariosto had a finer or a more healthful 
sense of the pleasantness of external objects, or 
loved better to luxuriate anjidst sunbeams and 
flowers, the songs of nightingales, the juice of sum- 
mer fruits, and the coolness of shady fountains. 
His conception of love unites all the voluptuousness 
of the Oriental harem, and all the gallantry of the 
chivalric tournament, with all the pure and quiet 
affection of an English fire-side. His poetry re- 
minds us of the miracles of Alpine scenery. Nooks 
and dells, beautiful as fairy land, are embosomed in 
its most rugged and gigantic elevations. The roses 
and myrtles bloom unchilled on the verge of the 
avalanche. 

CHARACTER OF THE PURITANS. 

We would speak first of the Puritans, the most 
remarkable body of men perhaps, which the world 
has ever produced. The odious and ridiculous 
parts of their character lie on the surface. He that' 
runs may read them ; nor have there been wanting 
attentive and malicious observers to point them out. 
For many years after the Restoration, they were 
the theme of unmeasured invective and derision. 
They were exposed to the utmost licentiousness of 
the press and of the stage, at the time when the 
press and the stage were most licentious. They 
were not men of letters ; they were as a body un- 
popular ; they could not defend themselves ; and 
the public would not take them under its protection. 
They were therefore abandoned, without reserve, 
10 the tender mercies of the satirists and dramatists'. 



CnAKACTER OP THE PURITANS. 17 

The ostentatious simplicity of their dress, their sour 
aspect, their nasal twang, their stiff posture, their 
long graces, their Hebrew names, the Scriptural 
phrases which they introduced on every occasion, 
their contempt of human learning, their detestation 
of polite amusements, were indeed fair game for 
the laughers. But it is not from the laughers alone 
that the philosophy of history is to be learnt. And 
he who approaches this subject should carefully 
guard against the influence of that potent ridicule, 
which has already misled so many excellent writers, 

" Ecco il fonte del rise, ed ecco il rio 
Che moitali perigli in se contiene : 
Hor qui tener a I'ren nostro a desio, 
Ed esser cauti molto a noi conviene."* 

Those who roused the people to resistance — who 
directed their measures through a long series of 
eventful years — who formed out of the most un- 
promising materials, the finest army that Europe 
had ever seen — who trampled down King, Church, 
and Aristocracy — who, in the short intervals of 
domestic sedition and rebellion, made the nam^e of 
England terrible to every nation on the face of the 
earth, were no vulgar fanatics. Most of their ab- 
surdities were mere external badges, like the signs 
of free-masonry, or the dresses of friars. We regret 
that these badges were not more attractive. We 
regret that a body, to whose courage and talents 
mankind has owed inestimable obligations, had not 
the lofty elegance which distinguished some of th« 

♦ Gerusalemme Liberata, xv. 57. 



16 MACAULAY'S MISCELLANIES. 

adherents of Charles I., or the easy good-breeding 
for which the court of Charles II. was celebrated. 
But, if we must make our choice, we shall, like 
Bassanio in the play, turn from the specious caskets, 
which contain only the Death's head and the Fool's 
head, and fix our choice on the plain leaden chest 
which conceals the treasure. 

The Puritans were men whose minds had derived 
a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of 
superior beings and eternal interests. Not content 
with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling 
Providence, they habiti::ially ascribed every event to 
the will of the Great Being, for whose power no- 
thing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing 
was too minute. To know him, to serve him, to 
enjoy him, was with them the great end of existence. 
They rejected with contempt the ceremonious hom- 
age which other sects substituted for the pure wor- 
ship of the soul. Instead of catching occasional 
glimpses of the Deity through an obscuring veil, 
they aspired to gaze full on the intolerable bright- 
ness, and to commune with him face to face. 
Hence originated their contempt for terrestrial 
distinctions. The difference between the greatest 
and meanest of mankind seemed to vanish, when 
compared with the boundless interval which separa- 
ted the whole race from him on whom their own 
eyes were constantly fixed. They recognised no 
title to superiority but his favor; and confident of 
that favor, they despised all the accomplishments 
and al] the dignities of the world. If they were 
unacquainted with the works of philosophers and 
poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of God. 



CHARACTER OF THE PURITANS. 19 

If their names were not found in the registers of 
heralds, they felt assured that they were recorded 
in the Book of Life. If their steps were not accom- 
panied by a splendid train of menials, legions of 
ministering angels had charge over them. Their 
palaces were houses not made with hands : their 
diadems crowns of glory which should never fade 
away ! On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles 
and pnests, they looked down with contempt : for 
they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious 
treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language, 
nobles by the right of an ean'er creation, and priests 
by the imposition of a mightier hand. The very 
meanest of them was a being to whose fate a mys- 
terious and terrible importance belonged — -on whose 
slightest action the Spirits of light and darkness 
looked with anxious interest— -who had been desti- 
ned, before heaven and earth were created, to 
enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven 
and earth should have passed away. Events which 
short-sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes 
had been ordained on his account. For his sake 
empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. 
For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed his will 
by the pen of the evangelist, and the harp of the 
prophet. He had been rescued by no common de- 
liverer from the grasp of no common foe. He had 
been ransomed by the sweat of no vulgar agony, by 
the blood of no earthly sacrifice. It was for him 
that the sun had been darkened, that the rocks had 
been rent, that the dead had arisen, that all nature 
had shuddered at the sufferings of her expiring Grod ! 
Such we believe to have been the character of 
2 



20 macaulay's miscellanies, 

the Puritans. We perceive the absurdity of their 
manners. We disUke the sullen gloom of their do^ 
mestic habits. We acknowledge that the tone of 
their minds was often injured by straining after 
things too high for mortal reach. And we know 
that, in spite of their hatred of Popery, they too 
often fell into the worst vices of that bad system, 
intolerance and extravagant austerity—that they 
had their anchorites and their crusades, their Dun- 
stans and their De Montforts, their Dominies and 
their Escobars. Yet when all circumstances are 
taken into consideration, we do not hesitate to pro- 
nounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, and a 
useful body. 

MILTON. 

We must conclude. And yet we can scarcely 
tear ourselves away from the subject. The days 
immediately following the publication of this relic 
of Milton appear to be peculiarly set apart, and 
consecrated to his memory. And we shall scarcely 
be censured, if, on this his festival, we be found 
lingering near his shrine, how worthless soever may 
be the offering which we bring to it. While this 
book lies on our table, we seem to be contempora- 
ries of the great poet. We are transported a hun- 
dred and fifty years back. We can almost fancy 
that we are visiting him in his small lodging ; that 
we see him sitting at the old organ beneath the 
faded green hangings ; that we can catch the quick 
twinkle of his eyes, rolling in vain to find the day j 
that we are reading in the lines of his noble coun- 



MILTON. 21 

tenance the proud and mournful history of his glory 
and his affliction ! We image to ourselres the 
breathless silence in which we should listen to his 
slightest word; the passionate veneration with which 
we should kneel to kiss his hand and weep upon it ; 
the earnestness with which we should endeavor to 
console him, if indeed such a spirit could need con- 
solation, for the neglect of an age unworthy of his 
talents and his virtues ; the eagerness with which 
we should contest with his daughters, or with his 
Quaker friend Elvvood, the privilege of reading 
Homer to him, or of taking down the immortal ac- 
cents which flowed from his lips. 

These are perhaps foolish feelings. Yet we can- 
not be ashamed of them ; nor shall we be sorry if 
what we have written shall in any degree excite 
them in other minds. We are not much in the habit 
of idolising either the living or the dead. And we 
think that there is no more certain indication of a 
weak and ill-regulated intellect, than that propensi- 
ty which, for want of a better name, we will venture 
to christen Bosivellism. But there are a few charac- 
ters which have stood the closest scrutiny and the 
severest tests, which have been tried in the furnace 
and have proved pure, which have been weighed in 
the balance an?l have not been found wanting, which 
have been declared sterling by the general consent 
of mankind, and which are visibly stamped with the 
image and superscription of the Most High. These 
great men we trust that we know how to prize ; 
and of these was Milton. The sight of his books, 
the sound of his name, are refreshing to us. His 
thoughts resemble those celestial fruits and flowers 



22 macaulay's miscellanies 

whicli the Virgin Martyr of Massinger sent down 
from the gardens of Paradise to the earth, distin- 
guished from the productions of other soils, not 
only by their superior bloom and sweetness, but by 
their miraculous efficacy to invigorate and to heal. 
They are powerful, not only to delight, but to ele- 
vate and purify. Nor do we envy the man who can 
Btudy either the life or the writings of the great 
Poet and Patriot, without aspiring to emulate, not 
indeed the sublime works with which his genius has 
enriched our literature, but the zeal with which he 
labored for the public good, the fortitude with 
which he endured every private calamity, the lofty 
disdain with which he looked down on temptation 
and dangers, the deadly hatred which he bore to 
bigots and tyrants, and the faith which he so sternly 
kept with his country and with his fame. 

MACHIAVELLL 

This digression will enable our readers to under- 
stand what we mean when we say that, in the 
Mandragola, Machiavelli has proved that he com- 
pletely understood the nature of the dramatic art, 
and possessed talents which would have enabled 
him to excel in it. By the correct and vigorous de- 
lineation of human nature, it produces interest with- 
out a pleasing or skilful plot, and laughter without 
the least ambition of wit. The lover, not a very 
delicate or generous lover, and his adviser the para- 
site, are drawn with spirit. The hypocritical con- 
fessor is an admirable portrait. He is, if we mistake 
not, the original of Father Dominic, the best comio 



MACHIAVELLI. 23 

character of Dryden. But old Nicias is the glory 
of the piece. We cannot call to mind anything 
that resembles him. The follies which Moliere 
ridicules are those of affectation, not thos6 of fatuity. 
Coxcombs and pedants, not simpletons, are his 
game. Shakspeare has indeed a vast assortment of 
fools ; but the precise species of which we speak is 
not, if we remember right, to be found there. 
Shallow is a fool. But his animal spirits supply, to 
a certain degree, the place of cleverness. His talk 
is to that of Sir John what soda-water is to cham- 
pagne. It has the effervescence, though not the 
body or the flavor. Slender and Sir Andrew Ague- 
cheek are fools, troubled with an uneasy conscious- 
ness of their folly, which, in the latter, produces a 
most edifying meekness and docility, and in the 
former, awkwardness, obstinacy, and confusion. 
Cloton is an arrogant fool, Osric a foppish fool, Ajax 
a savage fool ,• but Nicias is, as Thercites says of 
Patroclus, a fool positive. His mind is occupied by 
no strong feeling ; it takes every character, and re- 
tains none ; its aspect is diversified, not by passions, 
but by faint and transitory semblances of passion, a 
mock joy, a mock fear, a mock love, a mock pride, 
which chase each other like shadows over its sur- 
face, and vanish as soon as they appear. He is 
just idiot enough to be an object, not of pity or 
horror, but of ridicule. He bears some resem- 
blance to poor Calandrino, whose mishaps, as re- 
counted by Boccaccio, have made all Europe merry 
for more than four centuries. He perhaps resem- 
bles still more closely Simon de Villa, to whom 
Bruno and Biiffulmacco promised the love of the 



M 

Countess Civillari * Nicias is, like Simon, of a 
learned profession ; and the dignity with which he 
wears the doctoral fur renders his absurdities infi- 
nitely more grotesque. The old Tuscan is the very 
language for such a being. Its peculiar simplicity 
gives even to the most forcible reasoning and the 
most brilliant wit an infantine air, generally delight- 
ful, but to a foreign reader sometimes a little ludi- 
crous. Heroes and statesmen seem to lisp when 
they use it. It becomes Nicias incomparably, and 
renders all his silliness infinitely more silly. 

The political correspondence of Machiavelli, first 
published in 1767, is unquestionably genuine, and 
highly valuable. The unhappy circumstances in 
which his country was placed, during the greater 
part of his public life, gave extraordinary encour- 
agement to diplomatic talents. From the moment 
that Charles the Eighth descended from the Alps, 
the whole character of Italian politics was changed. 
The governments of the Peninsula cease to form an 
independence system. Drawn from their old orbit 
by the attraction of the larger bodies which now ap- 
proached them, they became mere satellites of 
France and Spain. All their disputes, internal and 
external, were decided by foreign influence. The 
contests of opposite factions were carried on, not as 
formerly in the Senate-house, or in the market-place, 
but in the antechambers of Louis and Ferdinand. 
Under these circumstances, the prosperity of the 
Italian States depended far more on the ability of 
their foreign agents, than on the conduct of thosfe 

* Decameron, Glom. viii. Nov. 9. 



DRYDEN. 25 

wlio were intrusted with the domestic administra- 
tion. The ambassador had to discharge functions 
far more dehcate than transmitting orders of knight- 
hood, introducing tourists, or presenting his brethren 
with the homage of his high consideration. He was 
an advocate to whose management the dearest in- 
terests of his cUents were intrusted, a spy clothed 
with an inviolable character. Instead of consulting 
the dignity of those whom he represented by a 
reserved manner and an ambiguous style, he was to 
plunge into all the intrigues of the court at which 
he resided, to discover and flatter every weakness 
of the prince who governed his employers, of the 
favorite who governed the prince, and of the lacquey 
who governed the favorite. He was to compliment 
the mistress and bribe the confessor, to panegyrise 
or supplicate, to laugh or weep, to accommodate 
himself to every caprice, to lull every suspicion, to 
treasure every hint, to be everything, to observe 
everything, to endure everything. High as the art 
of political intrigue had been carried in Italy, these 
were times which required it all. 

DPxYDEN.* 

The public voice has assigned to Dryden the first 
place in the second rank of our poets — no mean 
station in a table of intellectual precedency so rich 
in illustrious names. It is allowed that, even of the 
few who were his superiors in genius, none has ex- 
ercised a more extensive or permanent influence on 

* The Poetical Works of John Dryden. In two volumes. 
University Edition. London, 1826. 



26 macaulay's miscellanies. 

the national habits of thought and expression. His 
life was commensurate with the period during which 
a great revolution in the public taste was effected ; 
and in that revolution he played the part of Crom- 
well. By unscrupulously taking the lead in its 
wildest excesses, he obtained the absolute guidance 
of it. By trampling on laws, he acquired the au- 
thority of a legislator. By signalising himself as 
the most daring and irreverent of rebels, he raised 
himself to the dignity of a recognised prince. He 
commenced his career by the most frantic outrages. 
He terminated it in the repose of established sove- 
reignty — the author of a new code, the root of a 
new dynasty. 

Of Dryden, however, as of almost every man who 
has been disting^uished either in the literary or in 
the political world, it may be said that the course 
which he pursued, and the effect which he produced, 
depended less on his personal qualities than on the 
circumstances in which he was placed. Those who 
have read history with discrimination know the 
fallacy of these panegyrics a^d invectives, which 
represent individuals as effecting great moral and 
intellectual revolutions, subverting established sys- 
tems, and imprinting a new character on their age. 
The difference between one man and another is by 
no means so great as the superstitious crowd sup- 
poses. But the same feelings which, in ancient 
Rome, produced the apotheosis of a popular empe- 
ror, and, in modem Rome, the canonization of a 
devout prelate, lead men to cherish an illusion 
which furnishes them with something to adore. By 
a law of association, from the operation of which 



DRYDEN. 27 

even minds the most strictly regulated by reason 
are not wholly exempt, misery disposes us to hatred, 
and happiness to love, although there may be no 
person to whom our misery or our happiness can 
be ascribed. The peevishness of an invalid vents 
itself even on those who alleviate his pain. The 
good humor of a man elated by success often dis- 
plays itself towards enemies. In the same manner, 
the feelings of pleasure and admiration, to which 
the contemplation of great events gives birth, make 
an object where they do not find it. Thus, nations 
descend to the absurdities of Egyptian idolatry, and 
worship stocks and reptiles — Sacheverells and Wil- 
keses. They even fall prostrate before a deity to 
which they have themselves given the form which 
commands their veneration, and which, unless fash- 
ioned by them, would have remained a shapeless 
block. They persuade themselves that they are the 
creatures of what they have themselves created. 
For, in fact, it is the age that fonns the man, not 
the man that forms the age. Great minds do indeed 
react on the society which has made them what 
they are ; but they only pay with interest what they 
have received. We extol Bacon, and sneer at 
Aquinas. But if their situations had been changed, 
Bacon might have been the Angelical Doctor, the 
most subtle Aristotelian of the schools ; the Domin- 
ican might have led forth the sciences from their 
house of bondage. If Luther had been born in the 
tenth century, he would have effected no reforma- 
tion. If he had never been born at all it is evident 
that the sixteenth century could not have elapsed 
without a great schism in the church. Voltaire, in 
b2 



28 macaulay's miscellanies. 

the days of Louis the Fourteenth, would probably 
have been, hke most of the Kterary men of that 
time, a zealous Jansenist, eminent among the de- 
fenders of efficacious grace, a bitter assailant of the 
lax morality of the Jesuits, and the unreasonable 
decisions of the Sorbonne. If Pascal had entered 
on his literary career, when intelligence was more 
general, and abuses at the same time more flagrant, 
when the church was polluted by the Iscariot Du- 
bois, the court disgraced by the orgies of Canillac, 
and the nation sacrificed to the juggles of Law; if 
he had lived to see a dynasty of harlots, an empty 
treasury and a crowded harem, an army formidable 
only to those whom it should have protected, a 
priesthood just religious enough to be intolerant, he 
might possibly, like every man of genius in France, 
have imbibed extravagant prejudices against mo- 
narchy and Christianity, The wit which blasted the 
sophisms of Escobar, the impassioned eloquence 
which defended the sisters of Port Royal, the intel- 
lectual hardihood which was not beaten down even 
by Papal authority, might have raised him to the 
Patriarchate of the Philosophical Church. It was 
long disputed whether the honor of inventing the 
method of Fluxions belonged to Newton or to Leib- 
pitz. It is now generally allowed that these great 
men made the same discovery at the same time. 
Mathematical science, indeed, had then reached 
such a point, that if neither of them had ever exist- 
ed, the principle must inevitably have occun^ed to 
some person within a few years. So in our own 
time the doctrine of rent now universally received 
by political economists, was propounded almost at 



DRYDEN. 29 

the same moment, by two writers unconnected with 
each other. Preceding speculators had long been 
blundering round about it ; and it could not possi- 
bly have been missed much longer by the most 
heedless inquirer. We are inclined to think that, 
with respect to every great addition which has been 
made to the stock of human knowledge, the case has 
been similar; that without Copernicus we should 
have been Copernicans, that without Columbus 
America would have been discovered, that without 
Locke we should have possessed a just theory of 
the origin of human ideas. Society indeed has its 
great men and its little men, as the earth has its 
mountains and its valleys. But the inequalities of 
intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of our 
globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that, 
in calculating its great revolutions, they may safely 
be neglected. The sun illuminates the hills, while 
it is still below the horizon ; and truth is discovered 
by the highest minds a little before it becomes man- 
ifest to the multitude. This is the extent of their 
superiority. They are the first to catch and reflect 
a light, which, without their assistance, must, in a 
short time, be visible to those who lie far beneath 
them. 

Some years before his death, Dryden altogether 
ceased to write for the stage. He had turned his 
powers in a new direction, with success the most 
splendid and decisive. His taste had gradually 
awakened his creative faculties. The first rank in 
poetry was beyond his reach, but he challenged and 
secured the most honorable place in the second. 
His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. 



30 macaulay's miscellanies. 

It enabled him to run, though not to soar. When 
he attempted the highest flights, he became ridicu- 
lous ; but while he remained in a lower region, he 
outstripped all competitors. 

All his natural, and all his acquired powers, fitted 
him to found a good critical school of poetry. In- 
deed he carried his reforms too far for his age. 
After his death, our literature retrograded ; and a 
century was necessary to bring it back to the point 
at which he left it. The general soundness and 
healthfulness of his mental constitution ; his infor- 
mation, of vast superfices, though of small volume ; 
his wit, scarcely inferior to that of the most distin- 
guished followers of Donne ; his eloquence," grave, 
deliberate, and commanding, could not save him 
from disgraceful failure as a rival of Skakspeare, 
but raised him far above the level of Boileau. His 
command of language was immense. With him 
died the secret of the old poetical diction of England 
— the art of producing rich effects by familiar words. 
In the following century, it was as completely lost 
as the Gothic method of painting glass, and was but 
poorly Supplied by the laborious and tesselated imi- 
tations of Mason and Gray. On the other hand, he 
was the first writer under whose skilful manage- 
ment the scientific vocabulary fell into natural and 
pleasing verse. In this department, he succeeded 
as completely as his contemporary Gibbons succeed- 
ed in the similar enterprise of carving the most 
delicate flowers from heart of oak. The toughest 
and most knotty parts of language became ductile 
at his touch. His versification in the same manner, 
while it gave the first model of that neatness and 



DRYDEN. 31 

precision which the following generation esteemed 
so highly, exhibited, at the same time, the last ex- 
amples of nobleness, freedom, variety of pause and 
cadence. His tragedies in rhyme, however worth- 
less in themselves, had at least served the purpose 
of nonsense-verses ; they had taught him all the arts 
of melody which the heroic couplet admits. For 
bombast, his prevailing vice, his new subjects gave 
little opportunity; his better taste gradually dis- 
carded it. 

He possessed, as we have said, in a pre-eminent 
degree, the power of reasoning in verse ; and this 
power was now peculiarly useful to him. His logic 
is by no means uniformly sound. On points of 
criticism, he always reasons ingeniously ; and, when 
he is disposed to be honest, correctly. But the the- 
ological and political questions, which he undertook 
to treat in verse, were precisely those which he 
understood least. His arguments, therefore, are 
often worthless. But the manner in which they are 
stated is beyond all praise. The style is transpa- 
rent. The topics follow each other in the happiest 
order. The objections are drawn up in such a 
manner, that the whole fire of the reply may be 
brought to bear on them. The circumlocutions 
which are substituted for technical phrases, are clear, 
neat, and exact. The illustrations at once adorn 
and elucidate the reasoning. The sparkling epi- 
grams of Cowley, and the simple garrulity of the 
burlesque poets of Italy, are alternately employed, 
in the happiest manner, to give effect to what is 
obvious ; or clearness to what is obscure. 

His literary creed was catholic, even to latitudi- 



32 macaulay's miscellanies. 

narianism ; not from any want of acuteness, but 
from a disposition to be easily satisfied. He was 
quick to discern the smallest glimpse of merit ; he 
was indulgent even to gross improprieties, when 
accompanied by any redeeming talent. When he 
said a severe thing, it was to serve a temporary 
purpose, — to support an argument, ^ to tease a 
rival. Never was so able a critic so free from 
fastidiousness. He loved the old poets, especial- 
ly Shakspeare. He admired the ingenuity which 
Donne and Cowley had so wildly abused. He did 
justice, amid the general silence, to the memory 
of Milton. He praised to the skies the Schoolboy 
lines of Addison. Always looking on the fair side 
of every object, he admired extravagance, on ac- 
count of the invention which he supposed it to indi- 
cate ; he excused affectation in favor of wit ; he 
tolerated even tameness for the sake of the correct- 
ness which was its concomitant. 

DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 

The vast despotism of the Caesars, gradually eifa- 
cing all national peculiarities, and assimilating the 
remotest provinces of the Empire to each other, 
augmented the evil. At the close of the third cen- 
tury after Christ, the prospects of mankind were 
fearfully dreary. A system of etiquette, as pom- 
pously frivolous as that of the Escurial, had been 
established. A sovereign almost invisible ; a crowd 
of dignitaries minutely distinguished by badges and 
titles ; rhetoricians who said nothing but what had 
been said ten thousand times j schools in which no- 



DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 33 

thing was taught but what had been known for age?" 
— such was the machinery provided for the govern- 
ment and instruction of the most enHghtened part 
of the human race. That great community was 
then in danger of experiencing a calamity far more 
terrible than any of the quick, inflammatory, de- 
stroying maladies, to which nations are liable — a 
tottering, drivelling, paralytic longevity, the immor- 
tality of the Struldbrugs, a Chinese civilization. It 
would be easy to indicate many points of resem- 
blance between the subjects of Diocletian, and the 
people of that Celestial Empire, where, during 
many centuries, nothing has been learned or un- 
learned ; where government, where education, 
where the whole system of life is a ceremony; 
where knowledge forgets to increase and multiply, 
and, like the talent buried in the earth, or the pound 
wrapped up in the napkin, experiences neither 
waste nor augmentation. 

The torpor was broken by two great revolutions, 
the one moral, the other political; the one from 
within, the other from without. The victory of 
Christianity over Paganism, considered with rela- 
tion to this subject only, was of great importance. 
It overthrew the old system of morals ; and with it 
much of the old system of metaphysics. It furnish- 
ed the orator with new topics of declamation, and 
the logician with new points of controversy. Above 
all, it introduced a new principle, of which the ope- 
ration was constantly felt in every part of society. 
It stirred the stagnant mass from the inmost depths. 
It excited all the passions of a stormy democracy in 
the quiet and listless population of an overgrown 



34 macaulay's miscellanies. 

empire. The fear of heresy did what the sense of 
oppression could not do ; it changed men, accus 
tomed to be turned over like sheep from tyiant to 
tyrant, into devoted partisans and obstinate rebels. 
The tones of an eloquence which had been silent 
for ages resounded from the pulpit of Gregory. A 
spirit which had been extinguished on the plains of 
Philippi, revived in Athanasius and Ambrose. 

Yet even this remedy was not sufficiently violent 
for the disease. It did not prevent the empire of 
Constantinople from relapsing, after a short parox- 
ysm of excitement, into a state of stupefaction, to 
which history furnishes scarcely any parallel. We 
there find that a polished society, a society in which 
a most intricate and elaborate system of jurispru- 
dence was established, in which the arts of luxury 
were well understood, in which the works of the 
great ancient writers were preserved and studied, 
existed for nearly a thousand years without making 
one great discovery in science, or producing one 
book which is read by any but curious enquirers. 
There were tumults, too, and controversies, and 
wars in abundance ; and these things, bad as they 
are in themselves, have generally been favorable to 
the progress of the intellect. But here they tor- 
mented without stimulating. The waters were 
troubled, but no healing influence descended. The 
agitations resembled the grinnings and writhings of 
a galvanised corpse, not the struggles of an athletic 
man. 



THE REFORMATION. 35 



THE KEFORMATION. 



In Germany, in France, in Switzerland, and in 
Scotland, the contest against the Papal power was 
essentially a religious contest. In all these coun- 
tries, indeed, the cause of the Reformation, like 
every other great cause, attracted to itself many 
supporters influenced by no conscientious principle, 
many who quitted the Established Church only be- 
cause they thought her in danger, many who were 
weary of her restraints, and many who were greedy 
for her spoils. But it was not by these adherents 
that the separation was there conducted. They 
were welcome auxiliaries; their support was too 
often purchased by unworthy compliances; but, 
however exalted in rank or power, they were not 
the leaders in the enterprise. Men of a widely dif- 
ferent description, men who redeemed gi'eat in- 
firmities and errors by sincerity, disinterestedness, 
energy and courage ; men who, with many of the 
vices of revolutionary chiefs and of polemic divines, 
united some of the highest qualities of apostles, 
were the real directors. They might be violent in 
innovation, and scurrilous in controversy. They 
might sometimes act with inexcusable severity to- 
ward opponents, and sometimes connive disreputa- 
bly at the vices of powerful allies. But fear was 
not in them, nor hypocrisy, nor avarice, nor any 
petty selfishness. Their one great object was the 
demolition of the idols, and the purification of the 
sanctuary. If they were too indulgent to the fail- 
ings of eminent men, from whose patronage they 



36 macaulay's miscellanies. 

expected advantage to the cliurch, they never flincli- 
ed before persecuting tyrants and hostile armies. 
If they set the hves of others at nought in compari- 
son of their doctrines, they were equally ready to 
throw away their own. Such were the authors of 
the great schism on the continent and in the north- 
ern part of this island. The Elector of Saxony and 
the Landgrave of Hesse, the Prince of Conde and 
the King of Navarre, Moray and Morton, might 
espouse the Protestant opinions, or might pretend 
to espouse them ; but it was from Luther, from 
Calvin, from Knox, that the Reformation took its 
character. 

TIMES OF GEORGE IL 

Already we seem to ourselves to perceive the 
signs of unquiet times, the vague presentiment of 
something great and strange which pervades the 
community ; the restless and turbid hopes of those 
who have everything to gain, the dimly-hinted fore- 
bodings of those who have everything to lose. 
Many indications might be mentioned, in them- 
selves indeed as insignificant as straws ; but even 
the direction of a straw, to borrow the illustration 
of Bacon, will show from what quarter the hurricane 
is setting in. 

A great statesman might, by judicious and timely 
reformations, by reconciling the two great branches 
of the natural aristocracy, the capitalists and the 
landowners, by so widening- the base of the govem- 
meht as to interest in its defence the whole of the 
middling class, that brave, honest, and sound-heart- 



TIMES OP GEORGE II. 37 

ed class, which is as anxious for the maintenance 
of order, and the security of property, as it is hostile 
to corruption and oppression, succeed in averting a 
struggle to which no rational friend of liberty or of 
law can look forward without great apprehensions. 
There are those who will be contented with nothing 
but demolition ; and there are those who shrink 
from all repair. There are innovators who long for 
a President and a National Convention ; and there 
are bigots who, while cities larger and richer than 
the capitals of many great kingdoms are calling oiit 
for representatives to watch over their interests, 
select some hackneyed jobber in boroughs, some 
peer of the narrowest and sm.allest mind, as the 
fittest depositary of a forfeited franchise. Between 
these extremes there lies a more excellent way. 
Time is bringing around another crisis analogous to 
that which occurred in the seventeenth century. 
We stand in a situation similar to that in which our 
ancestors stood under the reign of James the First. 
It will soon again be necessary to reform, that we 
may preserve ; to save the fundamental principles 
of the constitution, by alterations in the subordinate 
parts. It will then be possible, as it was possible 
two hundred years ago, to protect vested rights, to 
secure every useful institution — every institution 
endeared by antiquity and noble associations ; and, 
at the same time, to introduce into the system im- 
provements harmonising with the original plan. It 
remains to be seen whether two hundred years have 
made us wiser. 

We know of no great revolution which might not 
have been prevented by compromise early and gra- 



38 MACAULAY S MISCELLANIES. 

ciously made. Firmness is a great virtue in public 
affairs ; but it has its proper sphere. Conspiracies 
and insurrections in which small minorities are en- 
gaged, the outbreakings of popular violence uncon- 
nected with any extensive project or any durable 
principle, are best repressed by vigor and decision. 
To shrink from them is to make them formidable. 
But no wise ruler will confound the pervading taint 
with the slight local irritation. No wise ruler will 
treat the deeply seated discontents of a great party, 
as he treats the conduct of a mob which destroys 
mills and power looms. The neglect of this distinc- 
tion has been fatal even to governments strong in 
the power of the sword. The present time is in- 
deed a time of peace and order. But it is at such 
a time that fools are most thoughtless, and wise men 
most thoughtful. That the discontents which have 
agitated the country during the late and the present 
reign, and which, though not always noisy, are 
never wholly dormant, will again break forth with 
aggravated symptoms, is almost as certain as that 
the tides and seasons will follow their appointed 
course. But in all movements of the human mind 
which tend to great revolutions, there is a crisis at 
which moderate concession may amend, conciliate, 
and preserve. Happy will it be for England if, at 
that crisis, her interests be confided to men for 
whom history has not recorded the long series of 
human crimes and follies in vain. 



BURKE. 39 



BURKE. 



Mr. Burke, assuredly, possessed an understanding 
admirably fitted for the investigation of truth — an 
understanding stronger than that of any statesman, 
active or speculative, of the eighteenth century- 
stronger than everything, except his own fierce and 
ungovernable sensibility. Hence, he generally 
chose his side like a fanatic, and defended it like a 
philosopher. His conduct, in the most important 
events of his life, at the time of the impeachment 
of Hastings, for example, and at the time of the 
French Revolution, seems to have been prompted 
by those feelings and motives which Mr. Coleridge 
has so happily described : 

" Stormy pity and the cherished lure 
Of pomp, and proud precipitance of soul." 

Hindostan, with its vast cities, its gorgeous pago- 
das, its infinite swarms of dusky population, its 
long-descended dynasties, its stately etiquette, exci- 
ted in a mind so capacious, so imaginative, and so 
susceptible, the most intense interest. The peculi- 
arities of the costume, of the manners, and of the 
laws, the very mystery which hung over the language 
and origin of the people seized his imagination. To 
plead in Westminster Hall, in the name of the 
English people, at the bar of the English nobles, 
for great nations and kings separated from him by 
half the world, seemed to him the height of human 
glory. Again, it is not difficult to perceive, that his 
hostility to the French Revolution principally arose 



40 macaulay's miscellanies. 

from the vexation which he felt, at having all his 
old political associations disturbed, at seeing the 
"well-known boundary marks of states obliterated, 
and the names and distinctions with which the his- 
tory of Europe had been filled for ages, swept away. 
He felt like an antiquarian whose shield had been 
scoured, or a connoisseur who found his Titian re- 
touched. But however he came by an opinion, he 
had no sooner got it than he did his best to make 
out a legitimate title to it. His reason, like a spirit 
in the service of an enchanter, though spell-bound, 
was still mighty. It did whatever work his passions 
and his imagination might impose. But it did that 
work, however arduous, with marvellous dexterity 
and vigor. His course was not determined by ar- 
gument ; but he could defend the wildest course by 
arguments more plausible, than those by which 
common men support opinions which they have 
adopted after the fullest deliberation. Reason has 
scarcely ever displayed, even in those well constitu- 
ted minds of which she occupies the throne, so much 
power and energy as in the lowest offices of that 
imperial servitude. 

BYRON. 

His descriptions, great as was their intrinsic merit, 
derived their principal interest from the feeling 
which always mingled with them. He was himself 
the beginning, the middle, and the end of all his 
own poetry, the hero of every tale, the chief object 
in every landscape. Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a 
crowd of other characters, were universally consid- 



BVROJJ. 41 

ered merely as loose incognitos of Byron ; and there 
is every reason to believe that he meant them to be 
so considered. The wonders of the outer world, 
the Tagus, with the mighty fleets of England riding 
on its bosom, the towers of Cintra overhanging the 
shaggy forest of cork-trees and willows, the glaring 
marble of Pentelicus, the banks of the Rhine, the 
glaciers of Clarens, the sweet Lake of Leman, the 
dell of Egeria, with its summer-birds and rustling 
lizards, the shapeless ruins of Rome, overgrown 
with ivy and wall-flowers, the stars, the sea, the 
mountains — all were mere accessaries — the back- 
ground to one dark and melancholy figure. 

Never had any writer so vast a command of the 
whole eloquence of scorn, misanthropy and despair. 
That Marah was never dry. No art could sweeten, 
no draughts could exhaust, its perennial waters of 
bitterness. Never was there such variety in mono- 
tony as that of Byron. From maniac laughter to 
piercing lamentation, there was not a single note of 
human anguish of which he was not master. Year 
after year, and month after month, he continued to 
repeat that to be wretched is the destiny of all; 
that to be eminently wretched, is the destiny of the 
eminent ; that all the desires by which we are cur- 
sed lead alike to misery ; — if they are not gratified, 
to the misery of disappointment ; if they are grati- 
fied, to the misery of satiety. His principal heroes 
are men who have arrived by different roads at the 
same goal of despair, who are sick of life, who are 
at war with society, who are supported in their an- 
guish only by an unconquerable pride, resembling 
that of Prometheus on the rock, or of Satan in the 



42 macaulay's miscellanies. 

burning marl ; who can master their agonies by the 
force of their will, and who, to the last, defy the 
whole power of earth and heaven. He always de- 
scribed himself as a man of the same kind with his 
favorite creations, as a man whose heart had been 
withered, whose capacity for happiness was gone, 
and could not be restored ; but whose invincible 
spirit dared the worst that could befall him here or 
hereafter. 

BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON.. 

We are not sure that there is in the whole history 
of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as 
this book. Many of the greatest men that ever 
lived have written biography. Boswell was one of 
tlie smallest men that ever lived ; and he has beaten 
them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to 
his own account, or to the united testimony of all 
who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest 
intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who 
had missed his only chance of immortality, by not 
having been alive when the Dunciad was written. 
Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression 
for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole 
of that brilliant society which has owed to him the 
greater part of its fame. He was always laying 
himself at the feet of some eminent man, and beg- 
ging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was 
always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then 
" binding it as a crown unto him," — not merely in 
metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself, at 
the Shakspeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which fill- 



BOSWELL's life op JOHNSON. 43 

ed Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard around his 
hat, bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell. In 
his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world, that at 
Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of 
Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent — shallow 
and pedantic — a bigot and a sot — -bloated with fam- 
ily pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity 
of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebear- 
er, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns 
of London — so curious to know everybody who was 
talked about, that, Tory and High Churchman as 
he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an 
introduction to Tom Paine — so vain of the most 
childish distinctions, that, when he had been to 
court, he drove to the office wliere his book was 
being printed without changing his clothes, and 
summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new 
ruffles and sword ; — such was this man :- — and such 
he was content and proud to be. Everything which 
another man would have hidden — everything, the 
publication of which would have made another man 
hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous ex- 
ultation to his weak and diseased mind. What 
silly things he said — what bitter retorts he provoked 
— how at one place he was troubled with evil pre- 
sentiments which came to nothing' — how at another 
place, on waking from a drunken dose, he read the 
prayer-book, and took a hair of the dog that had 
bitten him — how he went to see men hanged, and 
came away maudlin — how he added five hundred 
pounds to the fortune of one of his babies, because 
she was not frightened at Johnson's ugly face — how 
he was frightened out of his wits at sea — and how 



44 macaulay's miscellanies. 

the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted 
a child — how tipsy he was at Lady Cork's one eve- 
ning, and how much his merriment annoyed the 
ladies — how impertinent he was to the Duchess of 
Argyle, and with what stately contempt she put 
down his impertinence- — how Colonel Macleod 
sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness — 
how his father and the very wife of his bosom 
laughed and fretted at his fooleries ; — all these 
things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had 
been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicing. 
All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of 
his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his 
castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-com- 
placency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was 
making a fool of himself, to which it' is impossible 
to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. 
He has used many people ill, but assuredly he has 
used nobody so ill as himself 

That such a man should have written one of the 
best books in the world, is strange enough. 

In his early years he had occasionally seen the 
great ; but he had seen them as a beggar. He now 
came among them as a companion. The demand 
for amusement and instruction had, during the 
course of twenty years, been gradually increasing. 
The price of literary labor had risen ; and those ris- 
ing men of letters, with whom Johnson was hence- 
forth to associate, were for the most part persons 
widely different from those who had walked about 
with him all night in the streets, for want of a lodg- 
ing. Burke, Robertson, the Wartons, Gray, Mason, 
Gibbon, Adam Smith, Beattie, Sir William Jones, 



BOSWELL's life op JOHNSON. 45 

Goldsmith, and Churchill, were the most distin- 
guished wnters of what may be called the second 
generation of the Johnsonian age. Of these men, 
Churchill was the only one in whom we can trace 
the stronger lineaments of that character, which, 
when Johnson first came up to London, was com- 
mon among authors. Of the rest, scarcely any had 
felt the pressure of severe poverty. All had been 
early admitted into the most respectable society on 
an equal footing. They were men of quite a differ- 
ent species from the dependants of Curll and Os- 
borne. 

Johnson came among them the solitary specimen 
of a past age — the last survivor of a genuine race 
of Grub street hacks ; the last of that generation of 
authors whose abject misery and whose dissolute 
manners had furnished inexhaustible matter to the 
satirical genius of Pope. From nature, he had re- 
ceived an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution, 
and an iriitable temper. The manner in which the 
earlier years of his manhood had been passed, had 
given to his demeanor, and even to his moral char- 
acter, some peculiarities, appalling to the civilised 
beings who were the companions of his old age. 
The perverse iiTegularity of his hours, the slovenli- 
ness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion, in- 
terrupted by long intervals of sluggishness; his 
strange abstinence, and his equally strange voracity ; 
his active benevolence, contrasted with the constant 
rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his manners 
in society, made him, in the opinion of those with 
whom he lived during the last twenty years of his 
life, a complete original. An original he was, un- 



46 macaulay's miscellanies. 

doubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed 
full information concerning those who shared his 
early hardships, we should probably find, that what 
we call his singularities of manner, were, for the 
most part, failings which he had in common with 
the class to which he belonged. He ate at Streat- 
ham Park as he had been used to eat behind the 
screen at St. John's Gate, when he was ashamed to 
show his rasfffed clothes. He ate as it was natural 
that a man should eat who, during a great part of 
his life, had passed the morning in doubt whether 
he should have food for the afternoon. The habits 
of his early life had accustomed him to bear priva- 
tion with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with 
moderation. He could fast : but when he did not 
fast, he tore his dinner like a famished wolf, with 
the veins swelling on his forehead, and the perspi- 
ration running down his cheeks. He scarcely ever 
took wine. But when he drank it, he drank it 
greedily, and in large tumblers. These were, in 
fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral dis- 
ease, which raged with such deadly malignity in his 
friends Savage and Boyce. The roughness and 
violence which he showed in society were to be ex- 
pected from a man whose temper, not naturally 
gentle, had been long tried by the bitterest calami- 
ties — by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes ; 
by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of 
booksellers, by the derision of fools, by the insin- 
cerity of patrons, by that bread which is the bitter- 
est of all food, by those stairs which are the most 
toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which 
makes the heart sick. Through all these things the 



BOSWELL S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 47 

ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled 
manfully up to eminence and command. It was 
natural, that, in the exercise of his power, he should 
be " eo immitior, quia toleraverat" — that though 
his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, 
his demeanor in society should be harsh and despo- 
tic. For severe distress he had sympathy, and not 
only sympathy, but munificent relief. But for the 
suffering which a harsh word inflicts upon a delicate 
mind, he had no pity ; for it was a kind of suffering 
which he could scarcely conceive. He would carry 
home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from 
the streets. He turned his house into a place of 
refuge for a crowd of wretched old creatures who 
could find no other asylum ; nor could all their 
peevishness and ingratitude weary out his benevo- 
lence. But the pangs of wounded vanity seemed 
to him ridiculous ; and he scarcely felt sufficient 
compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. 
He had seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that 
he was not affected by paltry vexations ; and he 
seemed to think that everybody ought to be as much 
hardened to those vexations as himself. He was 
angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache ; 
with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust on 
the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, 
in his phrase, " foppish lamentations," which peo- 
ple ought to be ashamed to utter in a world so full 
of misery. Goldsmith crying because the Good-na- 
tured Man had failed, inspired him with no pity. 
Though his own health was not good, he detested 
and despised valetudinarians. Even great pecuni- 
ary losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely 



48 macaulay's miscellanies. 

to beggary, moved him very little. People whose 
hearts had been softened by prosperity might cry, 
he said, for such events ; but all that could be ex- 
pected of a plain man was not to laugh. 

The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was 
the union of great powers with low prejudices. If 
we judged of him by the best parts of his mind, we 
should place him almost as high as he was placed 
by the idolatry of Boswell ; if by the worst parts of 
his mind, we should place him even below Boswell 
himself. Where he was not under the influence 
of some strange scruple, or some domineering pas- 
sion, which prevented him from boldly and fairly 
investigating a subject, he was a wary and acute 
reasoner, a little too much inclined to skepticism, 
and a little too fond of paradox. No man was less 
likely to be imposed upon by fallacies in argument, 
or by exaggerated statements of fact. But if, while 
he was beating down sophisms, and exposing false 
testimony, some childish prejudices, ciuch as would 
excite laughter in a well-managed nursery, came 
across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. 
His mind dwindled away under the spell from 
gigantic elevation to dwarfish littleness. Those who 
had lately been admiring its amplitude and its force, 
were now as much astonished at its strange narrow- 
ness and feebleness, as the fisherman, in the Arabi- 
an tale, when he saw the genie, whose statue had 
overshadowed the whole seacoast, and whose might 
seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract 
himself to the dimensions of his small prison, and 
lie there the helpless slave of the charm of Solomon. 

What a singular destiny has been that of this re- 



EARL CHATHAM. 4^ 

markable man ! To be regarded in his own age as 
a classic, and in ours as a companion — to receive 
from his contemporaries that full homage which 
men of genius have in general received only from 
posterity — to be more intimately known to posteri- 
ty than other men are known to their contempora- 
ries ! That kind of fame which is commonly the 
most transient, is, in this case, the most durable. 
The reputation of those writings, which he probably 
expected to be immortal, is every day fading ; while 
those peculiarities of manner, and that careless 
table-talk, the memory of which, he probably 
thought, would die with him, are likely to be re- 
membered as long as the English language is spoken 
in any quarter of the globe. 

EARL CHATHAM. 

The truth is, that there scarcely ever lived a per- 
son who had so little claim to this sort of praise as 
Pitt. He was undoubtedly a great man. But his 
was not a complete and well-proportioned great- 
ness. The public life of Hampden, or of Somers, 
resembles a regular drama, which can be criticised 
as a whole, and every scene of which is to be 
viewed in connection with the main action. The 
public life of Pitt, on the other hand, is a rude 
though striking piece — a pie^e abounding in incon- 
gruities — a piece without any unity of plan, but re- 
deemed by some noble passages, the effect of which 
is increased by the tameness or extravagance of 
what precedes, and of what follows. His opinions 
were unfixed. His conduct at some of the most 



50 macauLay's miscellanies. 

important conjunctures of his life was evidently de* 
termined by pride and resentment. He had on.e 
fault, which of all human faults is most rarely found 
in company with true greatness. He was extreme- 
ly affected. He was an almost solitary instance of 
a man of real genius, and of a brave, lofty, and 
commanding spirit, without simplicity of character. 
He was an actor in the closet, an actor at Council, 
an actor in Parliament ; and even in private society 
he could not lay aside his theatrical tones and atti- 
tudes. We know that one of the most distinguish- 
ed of his partisans often complained that he could 
never obtain admittance to Lord Chatham's room 
till everything was ready for the representation, till 
the dresses and properties were all correctly dispo- 
sed, till the light was thrown with Rembrandt-like 
effect on the head of the illustrious performer, till 
the flannels had been arranged with the air of a 
Grecian drapery, and the crutch placed as graceful- 
ly as that of Belisarius or Lear. 

Yet, with all his faults and affectations, Pitt had, 
in a very extraordinary degree, many of the ele- 
ments of greatness. He had splendid talents, strong 
passions, quick sensibility, and vehement enthusiasm 
for the grand and the beautiful. There was some- 
thing about him which ennobled tergiversation itself. 
He often went wrong, very wrong. But to quote 
the language of Wordsworth, 

" He still retained, 
'Mid such abasement, what he had received 
From nature, an intense and glowing mind." 

In an age of low and dirty prostitution — in the 



EARL CHATHAM. 5l 

age of Doddington and Sandys — it was something 
to have a man who might, perhaps, under some 
strong excitement, have been tempted to ruin his 
country, but who never would have stooped to pilfer 
from her; — a man whose errors arose, not from a 
sordid desire of gain, but from a fierce thirst for 
power, for glory, and for vengeance. History owes 
to him this attestation — that, at a time when any- 
thing short of direct embezzlement of the public 
money was considered as quite fair in public men, 
he showed the most scrupulous disinterestedness ; 
that, at a time when it seemed to be generally taken 
for granted that government could be U23held only 
by the basest and most immoral arts, he appealed 
to the better and nobler parts of human nature ; 
that he made a brave and splendid attempt to do, 
by means of public opinion, what no other statesman 
of his day thought it possible to do, except by means 
of corruption ; that he looked for support, not like 
the Pelhams, to a strong Aristocratical connection, 
not, like Bute, to the personal favor of the sovereign, 
but to the middle class of Englishmen ; that he in- 
spired that class with a firm confidence in his inte- 
grity and ability ; that, backed by them, he forced 
an unwilHng court and an unwilling oligarchy to 
admit him to an ample share of power ; and that he 
used his power in such a manner as clearly proved 
that he had sought it, not for the sake of profit or 
patronage, but from a wish to establish for himself 
a great and durable reputation by means of eminent 
services rendered to the state. 



52 macaulay's miscellanies. 

SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH. 

His proper place was his library, a circle of men 
of letters, or a chair of moral and political philoso- 
phy. He distinguished himself highly in Parliament. 
But nevertheless Parliament was not exactly the 
sphere for him. The effect of his most successful 
speeches was small, when compared with the quan- 
tity of ability and learning which was expended on 
them. We could easily name men who, not pos- 
sessing a tenth part of his intellectual powers, hard- 
ly ever address the House of Commons without 
producing a greater impression than was produced 
by his most splendid and elaborate orations. His 
luminous and philosophical disquisition on the Re- 
form Bill was spoken to empty benches. Those, 
indeed, who had the wit to keep their seats, picked 
up hints which, skilfully used, made the fortune of 
more than one speech. But " it was caviare to the 
general." And even those who listened to Sir 
James with pleasure and admiration, could not but 
acknowledge that he rather lectured than debated. 
An artist who should waste on a panorama, on a 
scene, or on a transparency, the exquisite finishing 
which we admire in some of the small Dutch inte- 
riors, would not squander his powers more than this 
eminent man too often did. His audience lesem- 
bled the boy in the " Heart of Mid-Lothian," who 
pushes away the lady's guineas with contempt, and 
insists on having the white money. They preferred 
the silver with which they were familiar, and which 
they were constantly passing about from hand to 



Sm JAMES MACKINTOSH. 53 

hand, to the gold which they had never before seen, 
and with the vahie of which they were unacquainted. 
It is much to be regretted, we think, that Sir 
James Mackintosh did not wholly devote his later 
years to philosophy and literature. His talents 
were not those which enable a speaker to produce 
with rapidity a series of striking but transitory im- 
pressions, — to excite the minds of five hundred 
gentlemen at midnight, without saying anything 
that any one of them will be able to remember in 
the morning. His arguments were of a very differ- 
ent texture from those which are produced in Par- 
liament at a moment's notice, — which puzzle a plain 
man who, if he had them before him in writing, 
would soon detect their fallacy, and which the great 
debater who employed them forgets within half an 
hour, and never thinks of again. Whatever was 
valuable in the compositions of Sir James Mackin- 
tosh, was the ripe fruit of study and of meditation. 
It was riie same with his conversation. In his most 
familiar talk there was no wildness, no inconsisten- 
cy, no amusing nonsense, no exaggeration for the 
sake of momentary effect. His mind was a vast 
magazine, admirably arranged; everything was 
there, and everything was in its place. His judg- 
ments on men, on sects, on books, had been often 
and carefully tested and weighed, and had then 
been committed, each to its proper receptacle, in 
the most capacious and accurately constructed me- 
mory that any human being ever possessed. It 
would have been strange, indeed, if you had asked 
for anything that was not to be found in that im- 
mense storehouse. The article which you required 



64 MACAULAy's MISCELLANIESr. 

was not only there — it was ready. It was in its 
own proper compartment. In a moment it was 
brought down, unpacked, and displayed. If those 
who enjoyed the privilege, — for a privilege indeed 
it was, — of listening to Sir James Mackintosh, had 
been disposed to find some fault in his conversation, 
they might perhaps have observed that he yielded 
too little to the impulse of the moment. He seem- 
ed to be recollecting, not creating. He never ap- 
peared to catch a sudden glimpse of a subject in a 
new light. You never saw his opinions in the 
making, — still rude, still inconsistent, and requiring 
to be fashioned by thought and discussion. They 
came forth, like the pillars of that temple in which 
no sound of axes or hammers was heard, finished, 
rounded, and exactly euited to their places. What 
Mr. Charles Lamb has said, with much humor and 
some truth, of the conversation of Scotchmen in 
general, was certainly true of this eminent Scotch- 
man. He did not find, but bring. You could not 
cry halves to anything that turned up while you 
were in his company. 

The intellectual and moral qualities which are 
most important in a historian, he possessed in a very 
high degree. He was singularly mild, calm, and 
impartial in his judgments of men and of parties. 
Almost all the distinguished writers who have treat- 
ed of English history are advocates. Mr. Hallam 
and Sir James Mackintosh are alone entitled to be 
called judges. Bnt the extreme austerity of Mr. 
Hallam takes away something from the pleasure of 
reading his learned, eloquent, and judicious writings. 
He is a judge, but a hanging judge, the Page or 



SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 66 

Buller of the high court of literary justice. His 
black cap is in constant requisition. In the long 
calendar of those whom he has tried, there is hard- 
ly one who has not, in spite of evidence to charac- 
ter and recommendations to mercy, been ^ntenced 
and left for execution, wr James, perhaps, erred 
a little on the other side. He liked a maiden assize, 
and came away with white gloves, after sitting in 
judgment on batches of the most notorious offenders. 
He had a quick eye for the redeeming parts of a 
character, and a large toleration for the infirmities 
of men exposed to strong temptations. But this 
lenity did not arise from ignorance or neglect of 
moral distinctions. Though he allowed, perhaps, 
too much weight to every extenuating circumstance 
that could be urged in favor of the transgressor, he 
never disputed the authority of the law, or showed 
his ingenuity by refining away its enactments. On 
every occasion he showed himself firm where prin- 
ciples were in question, but full of charity towards 
individuals. 

SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 

He was no profound thinker. He was merely a 
man of lively parts and quick observation, — a man 
of the world among men of letters, — a man of let- 
ters among men of the world. Mere scholars were 
dazzled by the Ambassador and Cabinet councillor ; 
mere politicians by the Essayist and Historian. But 
neither as a writer nor as a statesman can we allot 
to him any very high place. As a man, he seems to 
us to have been excessively selfish, but very sober, 



56 macaulay's miscellanies. 

wary, and far-sighted in his selfishness; — to have 
known better than most people know what he really 
wanted in life ; and to have pursued what he want- 
ed with much more than ordinary steadiness and 
sagacity; — never sufferiBg himself to be drawn 
aside either by bad or^ood feelings. It was his 
constitution to dread failure more than he desired 
success, — to prefer security, comfort, repose, lei- 
sure, to the turmoil and anxiety which are insepa- 
rable from greatness ; — and this natural languor of 
mind, when contrasted with the malignant energy 
of the keen and restless spirits among whom his lot 
was cast, sometimes appear to resemble the mode- 
ration of virtue. But we must own, that he seems 
to us to sink into littleness and meanness when we 
compare him — we do not say with any high ideal 
standard of morality, — but with many of those frail 
men who, aiming at noble ends, but often drawn 
from the right path by strong passions and strong 
temptations, have left to posterity a doubtful and 
chequered fame. 

THE JCDMAN CATHOLIC CHUECH. 

There is not, and there never was, on this earth, 
a work of human policy so well deserving of exam- 
ination as the Roman Catholic Church. The histo* 
ry of that Church joins together the two great ages 
of human civilisation. No other institution is left 
standing which cariies the mind back to the times 
when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, 
and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the 
Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses 



THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. 57 

are but of yesterday, when compared with the line 
of the Supreme Pontiffs. That hne we trace back 
in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned 
Napoleon in the nineteenth century, to the Pope 
who crowned Pepin in the eighth ; and far beyond 
the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it 
is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of • 
Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic 
of Venice was modern when compared wich the 
Papacy ; and the republic of Venice is gone, and 
the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in 
decay, not a mere antique ; but full of life and 
youthful vigor. The Catholic Church is still send- 
ing forth to the furthest ends of the world, mission- 
aries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with 
Augustin ; and still confronting hostile kings with 
the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. 
The number of her children is greater than in any- 
former age. Her acquisitions in the New World 
have more than compensated her for what she has 
lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extend 
over the vast countries which lie between the plains 
of the Missouri and Cape Horn — cofifttries which, a 
century hence, may not improbably contain a popu- 
lation as large as that which now inhabit Europe. 
The members of her community are certainly not 
fewer than a hundred and fifty millions ; and it will 
be difficult to show that all the other Christian sects 
united, amount to a hundred and twenty millions. 
Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the 
term of her long dominion is approaching. She 
saw the commencement of all the governments, and 
of all the ecclesiastical establishments, that now 



58 macaulay's miscellanies. 

exist in the world ; and we feel no assurance that 
she is not destined to see the end of them all. Sh@ 
was great and respected before the Saxon had set 
foot on Britain — before the Frank had passed the 
Rhine — when Grecian eloquence still flourished at 
Antioch — when idols were still worshipped in the 
temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undi- 
minished vigor when some traveller from New Zea- 
land shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his 
stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch 
the ruins of St. Paul's. 

IGNATIUS LOYOLA. 

In the convent of the Theatines at Venice, under 
the eye of Caraffa, a Spanish gentleman took up his 
abode, tended the poor in the hospitals, went about 
in rags, starved himself almost to death, and often 
sallied into the streets, mounted on stones, and, 
waving his hat to invite the passers-by, began to 
preach in a strange jargon of mingled CastiHan and 
Tuscan. The Theatines were among the most 
zealous and rigid of men ; but to this enthusiastic 
neophyte their discipline seemed lax, and their 
movements sluggish ; for his own mind, naturally 
passionate and imaginative, had passed through a 
training which had given to all his peculiarities a 
morbid intensity ana energy. In his early life he 
had been the very prototype of the hero of Cervan- 
tes. The single study of the young Hidalgo had 
been chivalrous romance ; and his existence had 
been one gorgeous day-dream of princesses rescued 
and infidels subdued. He had chosen a Dulcinea, 



IGNATIUS X-OYOLA. S^ 

" no countess, no duchess" — these are his own 
words — " but one of far higher station ;" and he 
flattered himself with the hope of laying at her feet 
the keys of Moorish castles and the jewelled tur- 
bans of Asiatic kings. In the midst of these visions 
of martial glory and prosperous love, a severe 
wound stretched him on a bed of sickness. His 
constitution was shattered, and he was doomed to 
be a cripple for life. The palm of strength, grace, 
and skill in knightly exercises, was no longer for 
him. He could no longer hope to strike down gi- 
gantic soldans, or to find favor in the sight of beau- 
tiful women. A new vision then arose in his mind, 
and mingled itself with his old delusions in a manner 
which, to most Englishmen, must seem singular; 
but which those who know how close was the union 
between religion and chivalry in Spain, will be at 
no loss to understand. He would still be a soldier 
— he would still be a knight errant ; but the soldier 
and knight-errant of the spouse of Christ. He 
would smite the Great Red Dragon. He would be 
the champion of the Woman clothed with the Sun. 
He would break the charm under which false pro- 
phets held the souls of men in bondage. His rest- 
less spirit led him to the Syrian deserts, and to the 
chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. Thence he wander- 
ed back to the farthest west, and astonished the 
convents of Spain and the schools of France by his 
penance and vigils. The same lively imagination 
which had been employed in picturing the tumult 
of unreal battles, and the charms of unreal queens, 
now peopled his solitude with saints and angels. 
The Holy Virgin descended to commune with him. 



60 macaulay's miscellanies. 

He saw the Saviour face to face vrith the eye of 
flesh. Even those mysteries of religion which are 
the hardest trial of faith, were in his case palpable 
to sig-ht. It is difficult to relate TN^thout a pit^-ing 
eraile, that, in the sacrifice of the mass, he saw 
transubstantiation take place ; and that, as he stood 
praying on the steps of St. Dominic, he saw the 
Trinity in Unity, and wept aloud wixh joy and won- 
der. Such was the celebrated Ignatius Loyola, 
who, in the great Catholic reaction, bore the same 
share which Luther bore in the great Protestant 
movement. 

Dissatisfied \%'ith the system of the Theatines, the 
enthusiastic Spaniard turned his face towaid Home. 
Poor, obscure, without a pati'on, without recommen- 
dations, he entered the city where now two princely 
temples, rich ^\-ith paintings and many-colored mar- 
ble, commemorate his great services to the Church ; 
where his form stands sculptured in massive silver; 
where his bones, enshrined amid jewels, are placed 
beneath the altar of God. His actirity and zeal 
bore down all opposition ; and under his rule the 
order of Jesuits begjan to exist, and grew rapidly to 
the full measure of its gigantic powers. With what 
vehemence, with vrhat policy, with what exact dis- 
cipline, ^^'ith what dauntless courage, vvixh. what 
self-denial, -with what forgetfulness of the dearest 
private ties, ^vith what intense and stubborn devo- 
tion to a single end, with what unscrupulous laxity 
and versatility in the choice of means, the Jesuits 
fought the battles of their church, is written in every 
page of the annals of Europe during several gene- 
rations. In the order of Jesus was concentrated 



IGNATIUS LOYOLA. 61 

the quintessence of the Catholic spirit ; and the 
history of the order of Jesus is the history of the 
great Catholic reaction. That order possessed 
itself at once of all the strongholds which command 
the public juind — of the pulpit, of the press, of the 
confessional, of the academies. Wherever the 
Jesuit preached the church was too small for the 
audience. The name of Jesuit on a title-page, 
secured the circulation of a book. It was in the 
ears of the Jesuit that the powerful, the noble, and 
the beautiful, breathed the secret history of theii 
lives. It was at the feet of the Jesuit that the youth 
of the higher and middle classes were brought up 
from the first rudiments to the courses of rhetoric 
and philosophy. Literature and science, lately 
associated with infidelity or with heresy, now be- 
came the allies of orthodoxy. 

Dominant in the south of Europe, the great order 
soon went forth conquering and to conquer. In 
spite of oceans and deserts, of hunger and pesti- 
lence, of spies and penal laws, of dungeons and 
racks, of gibbets and quartering-blocks, Jesuits were 
to be found under every disguise, and in every coun- 
try — scholars, physicians, merchants, sei-ving-men ; 
in the hostile court of Sweden, in the old manor- 
houses of Cheshire, among the hovels of Connaught ; 
arguing, instructing, consoling, stealing away the 
hearts of the young, animating the courage of the 
timid, holding up the crucifix before the eyes of the 
dying. 



62 macaulay's miscellanies. 

POLICY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND OF 
THE CHURCH OF ROME COMPARED. 

In England it not unfrequently happens that a 
tinker or a coal-heaver hears a sermon, or falls in 
with a tract, which alarms him about the state of 
his soul. If he be a man of excitable nerves and 
strong imagination, he thinks himself given over to 
the Evil Power. He doubts whether he has hot 
committed the unpardonable sin. He imputes every 
wild fancy that springs up in his mind to the whisper 
of a fiend. His sleep is broken by dreams of the 
great judgment-seat, the open books and the un- 
quenchable fire. If, in order to escape from these 
vexing thoughts, he flies to amusement or to licen- 
tious indulgence, the delusive relief only makes his 
misery darker and more hopeless. At length a turn 
takes place. He is reconciled to his offended Ma- 
ker. To borrow the fine imagery of one who had 
himself been thus tried, he emerges from the Valley 
of the Shadow of Death, from the dark land of gins 
and snares, of quagmires and precipices, of evil 
spirits and ravenous beasts. The sunshine is on his 
path. He ascends the Delectable Mountains, and 
catches from their summit a distant view of the 
shining city which is the end of his pilgrimage. 
Then arises in his mind a natural, and surely not a 
censurable desire to impart to others thoughts of 
which his own heart is full — to warn the careless, to 
comfort those who are troubled in spirit. The im- 
pulse which urges him to devote his whole life to 
the teaching of religion, is a strong passion in the 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 63 

guise of a duty. He exhorts his neighbors ; and if 
he be a man of strong parts, he often does so with 
great effect. He pleads as if he were pleading for 
his life, with tears and pathetic gestures, and burn- 
ing words ; and he soon finds with delight, not per- 
haps wholly unmixed with the alloy of human 
infirmity, that his rude eloquence rouses and melts 
heroes who sleep very composedly while the rector 
preaches on the apostolical succession. Zeal for 
God, love for his fellow-creatures, pleasure in the 
exercise of his newly discovered powers, impel him 
to become a preacher. He has no quarrel with the 
establishment, no objection to its formulai'ies, its 
government, or its vestments. He would gladly be 
admitted among its humblest ministers. But, ad- 
mitted or rejected, his vocation is determined. His 
orders have come down to him, not through a long 
and doubtful series of Arian and Papist bishops, but 
direct from on high. His commission is the same 
that on the Mountain of Ascension was given to the 
Eleven. Nor will he, for lack of human creden- 
tials, spare to deliver the glorious message with 
which he is charged by the true Head of the 
Church. For a man thus minded, there is within 
the pale of the establishment no place. He has 
been at no college ; he cannot construe a Greek 
author, nor write a Latin theme ; and he is told that, 
if he remains in the communion of the Church, he 
must do so as a hearer, and that, if he is resolved to 
be a teacher, he must begin by being a schismatic. 
His choice is soon made. He harangues on Tower 
Hill or in Smithfield. A congregation is formed. 
A license is obtained. A plain brick building, with 



64 macaulay's miscellanies. 

a desk ana benches, is run up, and named Ebenezer 
or Bethel. In a few weeks the Church has lost for 
ever a hundred families, not one of which entertain- 
ed the least scruple about her articles, her liturgy, 
her government, or her ceremonies. 

Far different is the policy of Rome. The igno- 
rant enthusiast, whom the Anglican Church makes 
an enemy, and, whatever the learned and polite 
may think, a most dangerous enemy, the Catholic 
Church makes a champion. She bids him nurse his 
beard, covers him with a gown and hood of coarse 
dark stuff, ties a rope round his waist, and sends 
him forth to teach in her name. He costs her no- 
thing. He takes not a ducat away from the reve- 
nues of her beneficed clergy. He lives by the alms 
of those who respect his spiritual character, and are 
grateful for his instructions. He preaches, not ex- 
actly in the style of Massillon, but in a way which 
moves the passions of uneducated hearers ; and all 
his influence is employed to strengthen the Church 
of which he is a minister. To that Church he be- 
comes as strongly attached as any of the cardinals, 
whose scarlet carnages and liveries crowd the en- 
trance of the palace on the Quirinal. In this way 
the Church of Rome unites in herself all the strength 
of estabUshment, and all the strength of dissent. 
With the utmost pomp of a dominant hierarchy 
above, she has all the energy of the voluntary sys- 
tem below. It would be easy to mention very re- 
cent instances in which the hearts of hundreds of 
thousands, estranged from her by the selfishness, 
sloth, and cowardice of the beneficed clergy, have 
been brought back by the zeal of the begging friars. 



PROTESTANTISM AND CATHOLICISM. 65 



PROTESTANTISM AND CATHOLICISM. 

The geographical frontier between the two reli- 
gions has continued to run almost precisely where 
it ran at the close of the Thirty Years' War ; nor 
has Protestantism given any proofs of that " expan- 
sive power" which has been ascribed to it. But the 
Protestant boasts, and most justly, that wealth, 
civilisation, and intelligence, have increased far 
more on the northern than on the southern side of 
the boundary ; that countries so little favored by 
nature as Scotland and Prussia, are now among the 
most flourishing and best governed portions of the 
world — while the marble j^alaces of Genoa are de- 
serted — while banditti infest the beautiful shores of 
Campania — while the fertile sea-coast of the Ponti- 
fical State is abandoned to buffaloes and wild boars. 
It cannot be doubted, that since the sixteenth cen- 
tury, the Protestant nations^ — fair allowance being 
made for physical disadvantages — have made deci- 
dedly greater progress than their neighbors. The 
progress made by those nations in which Protestant- 
ism, though not finally successful, yet maintained a 
long sti'uggle, and left permanent traces, has gene- 
rally been considerable. But when we come to the 
Catholic Land, to the part of Europe in which the 
first spark of reformation was trodden out as soon 
as it appeared, and from which proceeded the im- 
pulse which drove Protestantism back, we find, at 
best, a very slow progress, and on the whole a re- 
trogi'ession. Compare Denmark and Portugal. 
When Luther began to preach, the superiority of 



66 macaulay's miscellanies. 

the Portuguese was unquestionable. At present 
the superiority of the Danes is no less so. Compare 
Edinburgh and Florence. Edinburgh has owed 
less to climate, to soil, and to the fostering care of 
rulers, than any capital, Protestant or Catholic. In 
all these respects, Florence has been singularly 
happy. Yet whoever knows what Florence and 
Edinburgh were in the generation preceding the 
Reformation, and what they are now, will acknow- 
ledge that some great cause has, during the last 
three centuries, operated to raise one part of the 
European family, and to depress the other. Com- 
pare the history of England and that of Spain during 
the last century. In arms, arts, sciences, letters, 
commerce, agriculture, the contrast is most striking. 
The distinction is not confined to this side of the 
Atlantic. The colonies planted by England in 
America, have immeasurably outgrown in power 
those planted by Spain. Yet we have no reason to 
believe that, at the beginning of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, the Castilian was in any respect inferior to the 
Englishman. Our firm belief is, that the North 
owes its great civilisation and prosperity chiefly to 
the moral effect of the Protestant Reformation ; 
and that the decay of the Southern countries of 
Europe is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catho- 
lic revival. 



LORD CLIVE, A BOY. 0T 



LORD CLIVE, A BOY. 



Some lineaments of the character of the man 
were early discerned in the child. There remain 
letters written by his relations when he was in his 
seventh year ; and from these it appears that, even 
at that early age, his strong will, and his fiery pas- 
sions, sustained by a constitutional intrepidity, which 
sometimes seemed hardly compatible with sound- 
ness of mind, had begun to cause great uneasiness 
to his family. " Fighting," says one of his uncles, 
" to which he is out of measure addicted, gives his 
temper such a fierceness and imperiousness, that he 
flies out on every trifling occasion." The old peo- 
ple of the neighborhood still remember to have 
heard from their parents how Bob CUve climbed to 
the top of the lofty steeple of Market-Drayton, and 
with what terror the inhabitants saw him seated on 
a stone spout near the summit. They also relate 
how he formed all the good-for-nothing lads of the 
town into a kind of a predatory army, and compel- 
led the shopkeepers to submit to a tribute of apples 
and halfpence, in consideration of which he guaran- 
teed the security of their windows. He was sent 
from school to school, making very little progress 
in his learning, and gaining for himself everywhere 
the character of an exceedingly naughty boy. One 
of his masters, it is said, was sagacious enough to 
prophesy that the idle lad would make a great figure 
in the world. But the general opinion seems to 
have been, that poor Robert was a dunce, if not a 
reprobate. His family expected nothing good from 



68 macaulay's miscellanies. 

sucli slender parts and such a headstrong temper. 
It is not strange, therefore, that they gladly accept- 
ed for him, when he was in his eighteenth year, a 
wi'itership in the service of the East India Compa- 
ny, and shipped him off to make a fortune, or to die 
of a fever at Madras. 

LORD CLIVE, A MAN. 

Clive was now twenty-five years old. After hesi- 
tating for some time between a military and a com- 
mercial life, he had at length been placed in a post 
which partook of both characters— that of commis- 
sary to the troops, with the rank of captain. The 
present emergency called forth all his powers. He 
represented to his superiors, that unless some vigor- 
ous effort were m.ade, Trichinopoly would fall, the 
house of Anaverdy Khan would perish, and the 
French would become the real masters *of the whole 
peninsula of India. It was absolutely necessary to 
strike some daring blow. If an attack were made 
on Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic, and the favor- 
ite residence of the Nabobs, it was not impossible 
that the siege of Trichinopoly would be raised. 
The heads of the English settlement, now thorough- 
ly alarmed by the success of Dupleix, and appre- 
hensive that, in the event of a new war between 
France and Great Britain, Madras would be instant- 
ly taken and destroyed, approved of Olive's plan, 
and intrusted the execution of it to himself. The 
young captain was put at the head of two hundred 
English soldiers, and three hundred sepoys armed 
and disciplined after the European fashioii. Of the 



DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE OF TAMERLANE. 69 

eight officers who commanded this little force under 
him, not a single one had ever been in action, and 
four of the eight were factors of the Company, whom 
dive's example had induced to offer their services. 
The weather was stormy; but Clive pushed on, 
through thunder, lightning, and rain, to the gates 
of Arcot. The garrison, in a panic, evacuated the 
fort, and the English entered it without a blow. 

But Clive well knew that he would not be suffer- 
ed to retain undisturbed possession of his conquest. 
He instantly began to collect provisions, to throw 
up works, and to make preparations for sustaining 
a siege. The garrison, which had fled at his ap- 
proach, had now recovered from its dismay, and, 
having been swollen by large reinforcements from 
the neighborhood to a force of three thousand men, 
encamped close to the town. At dead of night, 
Clive marched out of the fort, attacked the camp by 
surprise, slew great numbers, dispersed the rest, and 
returned to his quarters without having lost a single 
man. 

DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE OF TAMERLANE. 

The empire which Baber and his Moguls reared 
in the sixteenth century, was long one of the most 
extensive and splendid in the world. In no Euro- 
pean kingdom was so large a population subject to 
a single prince, or so large a revenue poured into 
the treasury. The beauty and magnificence of the 
buildings erected by the sovereigns of Hindostan, 
amazed even travellers who had seen St, Peter's. 
The innumerable retinues and gorgeous decorations 



70 macaulay's miscellanies. 

which surrounded the throne of Delhi, dazzled even 
eyes which were accustomed to the pomp of Ver- 
sailles. Some of the great viceroys, who held their 
posts by virtue of commissions from the Mogul, ruled 
as many subjects and enjoyed as large an income 
as the King of France or the Emperor of Germany. 
Even the deputies of these deputies might well 
rank, as^ to extent of territory and amount of reve- 
nue, with the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the 
Elector of Saxony. 

There can be little doubt that this great empire, 
powerful and prosperous as it appears on a superfi- 
cial view, was yet, even in its best days, far worse 
governed than the worst governed parts of Europe 
now are. The administration was tainted with all 
the vices of Oriental despotism, and with all the 
vices inseparable from the domination of race over 
race. The conflicting pretensions of the princes of 
the royal house, produced a long series of crimes 
and public disasters. Ambitious lieutenants of the 
sovereign sometimes aspired to independence. 
Fierce tribes of Hindoos, impatient of a foreign 
yoke, frequently withheld tribute, repelled the ar- 
mies of the government from their mountain fast- 
nesses, and poured down in arms on the cultivated 
plains. In spite, however, of much constant mis- 
administration, in spite of occasional convulsions 
which shook the whole frame of society, this great 
monarchy, on the whole, retained, during some 
generations, an outward appearance of unity, ma- 
jesty, and energy. But, throughout the long reign 
of Aurungzebe, the state, notwithstanding all that 
the vigor and policy of the prince could effect, was 



iOECLINE OF THE EMPIRE OF TAMERLANE. 71 

hastening to dissolution. After his death, which 
took place in the year 1707, the ruin was fearfully 
rapid. Violent shocks from without co-operated 
with an incurable decay which was fast proceeding 
within ; and in a few years the empire had under- 
gone utter decomposition. 

A series of nominal sovereigns, sunk in indolence 
and debauchery, sauntered away life in -secluded 
palaces, chewing bang, fondling concubines, and 
listening to buffoons. A series of ferocious inva- 
ders had descended through the western passes, to 
prey on the defenceless wealth of Hindostan. A 
Persian conqueror crossed the Indus, marched 
through the gates of Delhi, and bore away in tri- 
umph those treasures of which the magnificence 
had astounded Roe and Bernier ; — the Peacock 
Throne on which the richest jewels of Golconda had 
been disposed by the most skilful hands of Europe, 
and the inestimable Mountain of Light, which, after 
many strange vicissitudes, lately shone in the brace- 
let of Runjeet Sing, and is now destined to adorn 
the hideous idol of Orissa. The Afghan soon fol- 
lowed to complete the work of devastation which 
the Persian had begun. The warlike tribes of Raj- 
poots threw off" the Mussulman yoke. A band of 
mercenary soldiers occupied Rohilcund. The Seiks 
ruled on the Indus. The Jauts spread terror along 
the Jiimnah. The high lands which border on the 
western seacoast of India poured forth a yet more 
formidable race ; — a race which was long the terror 
of every native power, and which yielded only, after 
many desperate and doubtful struggles, to the for- 
tune and genius of England. It was under tha 



72 macaulay's miscellanies. 

reign of Aurungzebe that this wild clan of plunder- 
ers first descended from the mountains ; and, soon 
after his death, every corner of his wide empire 
learned to tremble at the mighty name of the Mah- 
rattas. Many fertile viceroyalties were entirely 
subdued by them. Their dominions stretched 
across the peninsular from sea to sea. Their Cap- 
tains reigned at Poonah, at Gaulior, in Guzerat, in 
Berar, and in Tanjore. Nor did they, though they 
had become great sovereigns, therefore cease to be 
freebooters. They still retained the predatory 
habits of their forefathers. Every region which 
was not subject to their rule was wasted by their 
incursions. Wherever their kettledrums were 
heard, the peasant threw his bag of rice on his 
shoulder, hid his small savings in his girdle, and 
fled with his wife and children to the mountains or 
the jungles — to the milder neighborhood of the hy- 
aena and the tiger. Many provinces redeemed their 
harvests by the payment of an annual ransom. 
Even the wretched phantom who still bore the im- 
perial title, stooped to pay this ignominious *' black 
mail." The camp-fires of one rapacious leader 
were seen from the walls of the palace of Delhi. 
Another, at the head of his innumerable cavalry, 
descended year after year on the rice-fields of Ben- 
gal. Even the European factors trembled for their 
magazines. Less than a hundred years ago, it was 
thought necessary to fortify Calcutta against the 
horsemen of Berar ; and the name of the Mahratta 
ditch still preserves the memory of the danger. 

Wherever the viceroys of the Mogul retained au- 
thority they became sovereigns. They might still 



THE LATE LORD HOLLAND. 73 

acknowledge in words the superiority of the house 
of Tamerlane ; as a Count of Flanders or a Duke 
of Burgundy would have acknowledged the superi- 
ority of the most hopeless driveller among the later 
Carlovingians. They might occasionally send to 
their titular sovereign a complimentary present, or 
solicit from him a title of honor. But they were in 
truth no longer lieutenants removable at pleasure, 
but independent hereditary princes. In this way 
originated those great Mussulman houses which for- 
merly ruled Bengal and the Carnatic, and those 
which still, though in a state of vassalage, exercise 
some of the powers of royalty at Lucknow and Hy- 
derabad. 

THE LATE LORD HOLLAND. 

The late Lord Holland succeeded to the talents 
and to the fine natural dispositions of his House. 
But his situation was very different from that of the 
two eminent men of whom we have spoken. In 
some important respects it was better ; in some it 
was worse than theirs. He had one great advan- 
tage over them. He received a good political edu- 
cation. The first lord was educated by Sir Robert 
Walpole. Mr. Fox was educated by his father. 
The late lord was educated by Mr. Fox. ^'he per- 
nicious maxims early imbibed by the fmt Lord 
Holland, made his great talents useless, and worse 
than useless, to the state. The pernicious maxims 
early imbibed by Mr. Fox, led him, at the com- 
mencement of his public life, into great faults, 
which, though afterward nobly expiated, were 
o 



74 macaulay's miscellanies. 

never forgotten. To the very end of his career, 
small men, when they had nothing else to say in 
defence of their own tyranny, bigotry, and imbecil- 
ity, could always raise a cheer by some paltry taunt 
about the election of Colonel Luttrell, the imprison- 
ment of the lord mayor, and other measures in 
which the great Whig leader had borne a part at 
the age of one or two-and-twenty. On Lord Hol- 
land no such slur could be thrown. Those who 
most dissent from his opinions must acknowledge, 
that a public life, more consistent, is not to be found 
in our annals. Every part of it is in perfect harmo- 
ny with every other ; and the whole is in perfect 
harmony with the great principles of toleration and 
civil freedom. This rare felicity is in a great mea- 
sure to be attributed to the influence of Mr. Fox. 
Lord Holland, as was natural in a person of his 
talents and expectations, began at a very early age 
to take the keenest interest in politics ; and Mr. 
Fox found the greatest pleasure in forming the 
mind of so hopeful a' pupil. They corresponded 
largely on political subjects when the young lord 
was only sixteen ; and their friendship and mutual 
confidence continued to the day of that mournful 
separation at Chiswick. Under such training, such 
a man as Lord Holland was in no danger of falling 
into those faults which threw a dark shade over the 
whole ^reer of his grandfather, and from which 
the youth of his uncle was not wholly free. 

On the other hand, the late Lord Holland, as 
compared with his grandfather and his uncle, labor- 
ed under one great disadvantage. They were 
members of the House of Commons. He became 



THE LATE LORD HOLLAND. 75 

a Peer while still an infant. When he entered 
public life, the House of Lords was a very small 
and a very decorous assembly. The minority to 
which he belonged was scarcely able to muster five 
or six votes on the most important nights, when 
eighty or ninety lords were present. Debate had 
accordingly become a mere form, as it was in the 
Irish House of Peers before the Union. This was 
a great misfortune to a man like Lord Holland. It 
was not by occasionally addressing fifteen or twenty 
solemn and unfriendly auditors, that his grandfather 
and his uncle attained their unrivalled parliamenta- 
ry skill. The former had learned his art in *' the 
great Walpolean battles," on nights when Onslow 
was in the chair seventeen hours without intermis- 
sion ; when the thick ranks on both sides kept un- 
broken order till long after the winter sun had risen 
upon them ; when the blind were led out by the 
hand into the lobby ; and the paralytic laid down 
in their bed-clothes on the benches. The powers 
of Charles Fox were, from the first, exercised in 
conflicts not less exciting. The great talents of the 
late Lord Holland had no such advantage. This 
was the more unfortunate, because the peculiar 
species of eloquence, which belonged to him in 
common with his family, required much practice to 
develope it. With strong sense, and the greatest 
readiness of wit, a certain tendency to hesitation 
was heriditary in the line of Fox. This hesitation 
arose, not from the poverty but from the wealtli of 
their vocabulary. They paused, not from the diffi- 
culty of finding one expression, but from the* 
difficulty of choosing between several. It was only 



t6 macaulay's miscellanies. 

by slow degrees, and constant exercise, that the first 
Lord Holland and his son overcame the defect. 
Indeed, neither of them overcame it completely. 

In statement, the late Lord Holland was not suc- 
cessful ; his chief excellence lay in reply. He had 
the quick eye of his House for the unsound parts 
of an argument, and a great felicity ^in exposing 
them. He was decidedly » more distinguished in 
debate than any Peer of his times who had not sat 
in the House of Commons. Nay, to find his equal 
among persons similarly situated, we must go back 
eighty years — to Earl Granville. For Mansfield, 
Thurlow, Loughborough, Grey, Grenville, Brough- 
am, Plunkett, and other eminent men, living and 
dead, whom we will not stop to enumerate, carried 
to the Upper House an eloquence formed and ma- 
tured in the Lower. The opinion of the most dis- 
cerning judges was, that Lord Holland's oratorical 
perfoimances, though sometimes most successftil, 
afforded no fair measure of his oratorical powers ; 
and that, in an assembly of which the debates were 
frequent and animated, he would have attained a 
very high order of excellence. It was, indeed, im- 
possible to converse with him without seeing that 
he was born a debater. To h m, as to his uncle, 
the exercise of the mind in discussion was a positive 
pleasure. With the greatest good nature and good 
breeding, he was the very opposite to an assenter. 
The word * disputatious' is generally used as a word 
of reproach; but we can express our meaning only' 
by saying that Lord Holland was most courteously 
and pleasantly disputatious. In truth, his quickness 
in discovering and apprehending distinctions and 



THE LATE LORD HOLLAND. 77 

analogies was such as a veteran judge mig'ht envy. 
The lawyers of the Duchy of Lancaster were aston- 
ished to find in an unprofessional man so strong a 
rehsh for the esoteric parts of their science ; and 
complained that as soon as they had sj)lit a hair, 
Lord Holland proceeded to split the filaments into 
filaments still finer. In a mind less happily consti- 
tuted, there might have been a risk that this turn 
for subtilty would have produced serious evil. But 
in the heart and understanding of Lord Holland 
there was ample security against all such danger. 
He was not a man to be the dupe of his own inge- 
nuity. He put his Logic to its proper use ; and in 
him the dialectician was always subordinate to the 
statesman. 

His political life is written in the chronicles of his 
country. Perhaps, as we have already intimated, 
his opinions on two or three great questions of For- 
eign Policy were open to just objection. Yet even 
his errors, if he erred, were amiable and respectable. 
We are not sure that we do not love and admire 
him the more because he was now and then sedu- 
ced from what we regard as a wise policy, by sym- 
pathy with the oppressed; by generosity towards 
the fallen ; by a philanthropy so enlarged, that it 
took in all nations ; by love of peace, which in him 
was second only to the love of freedom ; by the 
magnanimous credulity of a mind which was as in- 
capable of suspecting as of devising mischief 

We have hitherto touched almost exclusively on 
those parts of Lord Holland's character which were 
open to the observation of millions. How shall we 
express the feelings with which his memory is cher- 



78 macaulay's miscellanies. 

ished by those who were honored with his friend- 
ship ] Or in what language shall we speak of that 
House, once celebrated for its rare attractions to 
the furthest ends of the ci\41ised world, and now 
silent and desolate as the grave ? That House 
was, a hundred and twenty years ago, apostrophised 
by a poet in tender and graceful lines, which have 
now acquired a new meaning not less sad than that 
which they originally bore : — 

'• Thou hill, whose brow the antique structures grace, 
Reared by bold chiefs of Warwick's noble race, 
Why, once so loved, whene'er thy bower appears. 
O'er my dim eyeballs glance the sudden tears ? 
How sweet were once thy prospects fresh and fair 
Thy sloping walks, and unpolluted air ! . 
How sweet the glooms beneath thine aged trees. 
Thy noon-tide shadow, and thine evening breeze : 
His image thy forsaken bowers restore ; 
Thy walks and airy prospects charm no more ; 
No more the summer in thy glooms allay'd. 
Thine evening breezes, and thy noon-day shade." 

Yet a few years, and the shades and structures 
may follow their illustrious masters. The wonder- 
ful city which, ancient and gigantic as it is, still 
continues to grow as fast as a young towTi of log- 
wood by a water-privilege in Michigan, may soon 
displace those tuirets and gardens which are associ- 
ated with so much that is interesting and noble — 
with the courtly magnificence of Rich — with the 
loves of Ormond — with the counsels of Cromwell— 
with the death of Addison. The time is coming 
when, perhaps, a few old men, the last survivors of 
our generation, will in vain seek, amidst new 



THE LATE LORD HOLLAND. 71 

Streets, and squares, and rail-way stations, for the 
site of that dwelling which was in their youth the 
favorite resort of wits and beauties — of painters and 
poets — of scholars^ philosophers, and statesmen. 
They will then remember, with strange tenderness, 
many objects once familiar to them — the avenue 
and the terrace, the busts and the paintings ; the 
carving, the grotesque gilding, and the enigmatical 
mottoes. With peculiar fondness, they will recall 
that venerable chamber, in which all the antique 
gravity of a college library was so singularly blend- 
ed with all that female grace and wit could devise 
to embellish a drawing-room. They will recollect^ 
not unmoved, those shelves loaded with the varied 
learning of many lands and many ages ; those por- 
traits in which were preserved the features of the 
best and wisest Englishmen of two generations. 
They will recollect how many men who have guided 
the politics of Europe — who have moved great as- 
semblies by reason and eloquence — who have put 
life into bronze and canvass, or who have left to 
posterity things so written as it shall not willingly 
let them die — were there mixed with all that was 
loveliest and gayest in the society of the most splen- 
did of capitals. They will remember the singular 
character which belonged to that circle, in which 
every talent and accomplishment, every art and 
science, had its place. They will remember how 
the last debate was discussed in one corner, and 
the last comedy of Scribe in another ; while Wilkie 
gazed with modeet admiration on Reynolds' Barettij 
while Mackintosh turned over Thomas Aquinas to 
verify a quotation; while Talleyrand related hia 



80 macaulay's miscellanies. 

conversations with Barras at the Luxemburg, or his 
ride with Lannes over the field of Austerlitz. They 
will remember, above all, the grace — and the kind- 
ness, far more admirable than grace — with which 
the princely hospitality of that ancient mansion was 
dispensed. They will remember the venerable and 
benignant countenance, and the cordial voice of him 
who bade them welcome. They will remember 
that temper which years of pain, of sickness, of 
lameness, of confinement, seemed only to make 
sweeter and sweeter ; and that frank politeness, 
which at once relieved all the embarrassment of the 
youngest and most timid wiiter or artist, who found 
himself for the first time among Ambassadors and 
Earls. They will remember that constant flow of 
conversation, so natural, so animated, so various, so 
idch with observation and anecdote ; that wit which 
never gave a wound ; that exquisite mimicry which 
ennobled, instead of degrading ; that goodness of 
heart which appeared in every look and accent, and 
gave additional value to every talent and acquire- 
ment. They will remember, too, that he whose 
name they hold in reverence was not less distin- 
guished by the inflexible uprightness of his political 
conduct, than by his loving disposition and his win- 
ning manners. They will remember that, in the 
last lines which he traced, he expressed his joy that 
he had done nothing unworthy of the friend of Fox 
and Grey ; and they will have reason to feel similar 
joy, if, in looking back on many troubled years, 
they cannot accuse themselves of having done any- 
thing unworthy of men who were distinguished by 
the friendship of Lord Holland. 



TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS. 81 



TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS. * 

In the mean time, the preparations for his trial 
had proceeded rapidly; and on the 13th of Februa- 
ry, 1788, the sittings of the Court commenced. 
There have been spectacles more dazzHng to the 
eye, more gorgeous with jewellery and cloth of gold, 
more attractive to grown-up children, than that 
"which was then exhibited at Westminster ; but, 
perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well calcu 
lated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an 
imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest 
which belong to the near and to the distant, to the 
present and to the past, were collected on one spot, 
and in one hour. All the talents and all the accom- 
plishments which are developed by liberty and civil- 
isation were now displayed, with every advantage 
that could be derived both from co-operation and 
from contrast. Every step in the proceedings 
canied the mind either backward, through many 
troubled centuries, to the days when the founda- 
tions of the constitution were laid; or far away, 
over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations 
living under strange stars, worshipping strange 
gods, and writing strange characters from right to 
left. The High Court of Parliament was to sit, ac- 
cording to forms handed down from the days of the 
Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused of exer- 
cising tyranny over the lord of the holy city of 
Benares, and the ladies of the princely house of 
Oude. 

The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the 

• Governor General of India. d* 



82 MAC AUL ay's miscellanies. 

« 

great hall of William Rufus ; the hall which had 
resounded with acclamatioris at the inauguration of 
thirty kings ; the hall which had witnessed the just 
sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers; 
the hall where the eloquence of Strafford had for a 
moment awed and melted a victorious party inflam- 
ed with just resentment ; the hall where Charles 
had confronted the High Court of Justice with the 
placid courage which has half redeemed his fame. 
Neither mihtary nor civil pomp was wanting. The 
avenues were lined with grenadiers. The streets 
were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in 
gold and ermine, were marshalled by the heralds 
under Garter King-at-Arms. The judges, in their 
vestments of state, attended to give advice on points 
of law. Near a hundred and seventy Lords, three- 
fourths of the Upper House, as the Upper House 
then was, walked in solemn order from their usual 
place of assembling to ,the tribunal. The junior 
baron present led the way — Lord Heathfield, re- 
cently ennobled for his memorable defence of Gib- 
raltar against the fleets and armies of France and 
Spain. The long procession was closed by the 
Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of the realm, by the 
great dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons of 
the King. Last of all came the Prince of Wales, 
conspicuous by his fine person and noble bearing. 
The grey old walls were hung with scarlet. The 
long galleries were crowded by such an audience 
as has rarely excited the fears or the emulation of 
an orator. There were gathered together, from all 
parts of a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous 
rdfeilm, grace and female loveliness, wit and learn- 



TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS. 



83 



ing, the representatives of every science and of 
every art. There were seated around the Queen 
the -fair-haired young daughters of the house of 
Brunswick. There the Ambassadors of great Kings 
and Commonwealths gazed with admiration on a 
spectacle which no other country in the world could 
present. There Siddons, in the prime of her ma- 
jestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene sur- 
passing all the imitations of the stage. There the 
historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days 
when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against 
Verres ; and when, before a senate which had still 
some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against 
the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side by 
side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar 
of the age. The spectacle had allured Reynolds 
from that easel which has preserved to us the 
thouo-htful foreheads of so many writers and states- 
men, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. 
It had induced Parr to suspend his labors in that 
dark and profound mine from which he had extract- 
ed a vast treasure of erudition— a treasure too often 
buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudi- 
cious and inelegant ostentation ; but still precious, 
massive, and .splendid. There appeared the volup- 
tuous charms of her to whom the heir of the throne 
had in secret phghted his faith. There, too, was 
she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the 
Saint CeciUa, whose delicate features, lighted up 
by love and music, art has rescued from the com- 
mon decay. There were the members of that bril- 
Uant society which quoted, criticised, and exchanged 
repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs. 



84 macaulay's miscellanies. 

Montague. And there the ladies, whose lips, more 
persuasive than those of Fox himself, had carried the 
Westminster election against palace and treasury, 
shone round Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. 

The*^ Sergeants made proclamation. Hastings 
advanced to the bar and bent his knee. The cul- 
prit was indeed not unworthy of that great presence. 
He had ruled an extensive and populous country, 
had made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, 
had set up and pulled down princes. And in his 
high place he had so borne himself, that all had 
feared him, that most had loved him, and that hatred 
itself could deny him no title to glory, except virtue. 
He looked like a great man, and not like a bad man. 
A person small and emaciated, yet deriving dignity 
from a carriage which, while it indicated' deference 
to the court, indicated also habitual self-possession 
and self-respect; — -a high and intellectual forehead; 
— a brow pensive, but not gloomy ; — a mouth of in- 
flexible decision ; a face pale and worn, but serene, 
on which was written, as legibly as under the great 
picture in the council-chamber at Calcutta, JVIens 
mqua in arduis ;— such was the aspect with which 
the great pro-consul presented himself to his judges. 

His counsel accompanied him, men all of whom 
were afterwards raised by their talents and learning 
to the highest posts in their profession, — the bold 
and strong minded Law^, afterwards Chief Justice 
of the King's Bench ; the more humane and eloquent 
Dallas, afterwards Chief Justice of the Common 
Pleas ; and Plomer, who, nearly twenty years later, 
successfully conducted in the same high court the 
defence of Lord Melville, and subsequently became 
Vice Chancellor and Master of the Rolls. 



TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS. 85 

But neither the culprit nor his advocates attracted 
80 much notice as the accusers. In the midst of the 
blaze of red drapery, a space had been fitted up 
with green benches and tables for the Commons. 
The managers, with Burke at their head, appeared 
in full dress. The collectors of gossip did not fail 
to remark that even Fox, generally so regardless of 
his appearance, had paid to the illustrious tribunal 
the complim_ent of wearing a bag and sword. Pitt 
had refused to be one of the conductors of the im- 
peachment; and his commanding, copious, and 
sonorous eloquence, was wanting to that great mus- 
ter of various talents. Age and blindness had unfit- 
ted Lord North for the duties of a public prosecutor j 
and his friends were left without the help of his ex- 
cellent sense, his tact, and his urbanity. But, in 
spite of the absence of these two distinguished 
members of the Lower House, the box in which the 
managers stood, contained an array of speakers such 
as perhaps had not appeared together since the 
great age of Athenian eloquence. There stood Fox 
and Sheridan, the English Demosthenes, and the 
English Hyperides. There was Burke, ignorant, 
indeed, or negligent of the art of adapting his rea- 
Bonings and his style to the capacity and taste of his 
hearers; but in aptitude of comprehension and 
richness of imagination superior to every orator, 
ancient or modern. There, with eyes reverentially 
fixed on Burke, appeared the finest gentleman of 
the age — his form developed by every manly exer- 
cise — his face beaming with intelligence and spirit 
—the ingenious, the chivalrous, the high-souled 
Windham. Nor, though surrounded by such men 



BG macaulay's miscellanxes. 

idid the youngest manager pass unnoticed. At an 
age when most of those who distinguish themselves 
in life are still contending for prizes and fellowships 
at college, he had won for himself a conspicuous 
place in ParHaraent. No advantage of fortune or 
connection was wanting that could set off to the 
height his splendid talents and his unblemished 
honor. At twenty-three he had been thought wor- 
thy to be ranked ^^'ith the veteran statesmen who 
appeared as the delegates of the British Commons, 
at the bar of the British nobility. All who stood at 
that bar, save him alone, are gone — culprit, advo- 
cates, accusers. To the generation which is now in 
the -s-igor of life, he is the sole representative of a 
great age which has passed av/ay. But those who, 
within the last ten years, have listened with delight, 
till the morning sun shone in upon the tapestries of 
the House of Lords, to the lofty and animated elo- 
quence of Charles Earl Grey, are able to form some 
estimate of the powers of a race of men among 
whom he was not the foremost. 

The charges and the answers of Hastings were 
first read. This ceremony occupied two whole 
days, and was rendered less tedious than it would 
othervrise have been, by the silver voice and just 
emphasis of Cowper, the clerk of the Court, a near 
relation of the amiable poet. On the third day 
Burke rose. Four sittings of the court were occu- 
pied by his opening speech, which was intended to ' 
be a general introduction to all the charges. With 
an exuberance of thought and a splendor of diction 
which more than satisfied the highly-raised expec- 
tation of the audience, he described the character 



TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS. 87 

and institutions of the natives of India ; recounted 
the circumstances in which the Asiatic empire of 
Britain had originated ; and set forth the constitu- 
tion of the Company, and of the EngHsh Presiden- 
cies. Having thus attempted to communicate to his 
hearers an idea of Eastern society, as vivid as that 
which existed in his own mind , he proceeded to ar- 
raign the administration of Hastings, as systemati- 
cally conducted in defiance of morality and public 
law. The energy and pathos of the great orator 
extorted expressions of unwonted admiration even 
from the stern and hostile Chancellor ; and, for a 
moment, seemed to pierce even the resolute heart 
of the defendant. The ladies in the galleries, un- 
accustomed to such displays of eloquence, excited 
by the solemnity of the occasion, and perhaps not 
unwilling to display their taste and sensibility, were 
in a state of uncontrollable emotion. Handkerchiefs 
were pulled out; smelling-bottles were handed 
round ; hysterical sobs and screams were heard ; 
and Mrs. Sheridan was carried out in a fit. At 
length the orator concluded. Raising his voice till 
the old arches of Irish oak resounded — 

" My lords," said he, " these are the securities, 
which we have in all the constituent parts of the 
body of this house. "We know them, we reckon, 
we rest upon them, and commit safely the interests 
of India and of humanity into your hands. There- 
fore, it is with confidence, that, ordered by the 
CommoA, • 

** I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high 
crimes and misdemeanors. 

** I impeach him in the name of the Commons of 



88 macaxjlay's miscellanies. 

Great Britain in parliament assembled, whose par- 
liamentary trust he has betrayed. 

" I impeach him in the name of all the Commons 
of Great Britain, whose national character he has 
dishonored. 

" I impeach him in the name of the people of In- 
dia, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subvert- 
ed ; whose properties he has destroyed, whose 
country he has laid waste and desolate. 

" I impeach him in the name, and by virtue, of 
those eternal laws of justice, which he has violated. 

" I impeach him in the name of human nature 
itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and 
oppressed in both sexes, in every age, rank, situa- 
tion, and condition of life." 

WARREN HASTINGS. 

With all his faults — and they were neither few 
nor small — only one cemetery was worthy to con- 
tain his remains. In that temple of silence and 
reconciliation, where the enmities of twenty gene- 
rations lie buried, in the Great Abbey which has for 
ages afforded a quiet resting place to those whose 
minds and bodies have been shattered by the con- 
tentions of the Great Hall, the dust of the illustrious 
accused should have been mingled with the dust of 
the illustrious accusers. This was not to be. Yet 
the place of interment was not ill chosen. Behind 
the chancel of the parish-church'of Dayl^ford, in 
earth which already held the bones of many chiefs of 
the house of Hastings, was laid the coffin of the great- 
est man who has ever borne that ancient and widely 



WARREN HASTINGS. 89 

extended name. On that very spot probably, four- 
score years before, tie little Warren, meanly clad and 
scantily fed, had played with the children of plough' 
men. Even then his young mind had revolved plans 
which might be called romantic. Yet, however ro- 
mantic, it is not likely that they had been so strange 
as the truth. Not only had the poor orphan re- 
trieved the fallen fortunes of his line. Not only had 
he repurchased the old lands, and rebuilt the old 
dwelling. He had preserved and extended an em- 
pire. He had founded a polity. He had adminis- 
tered government and war with more than the 
capacity of Richelieu ; and had patronised learning 
with the judicious liberality of Cosmo. He had 
been attacked by the most formidable combination 
of enemies thaf ever sought the destruction of a 
single victim ; and over that combination, after a 
struggle of ten years, he had triumphed. He had 
at length gone down to his grave in the fulness of 
age — in peace, after so many troubles; in honor, 
after so much obloquy. 

Those who look on his character without favor oi 
malevolence, will pronounce that, in the two great 
elements of all social virtue — in respect for the 
rights of others, and in sympathy for the sufferings 
of others — he was deficient. His principles , were 
somewhat lax. His heart was somewhat hard. 
But while we cannot with truth describe him either as 
a righteous or as a merciful ruler, we cannot regard 
without'admiration the amplitude and fertility of his 
intellect-- his rare talents for command, for admin- 
istration and for controversy — his dauntless courage 
—his honorable poverty — his fervent zeal for the 



90 MACAtLAY*S MiSCELLANtES. 

interests of the state — his noble equanimity, tried 
by both extremes of fortune, and never disturbed 
by either. 

FATHER OF FREDERIC THE GREAT. 

Frederic, surnamed the Great, son of Frederick 
"WiUiam, was born in January, 1712. It may safely 
be pronounced that he had received from nature a 
strong and sharp understanding, and a rare firmness 
of temper and intensity of will. As to the other 
parts of his character, it is difficult to say whether 
they are to be ascribed to nature, or to the strange 
training which he underwent. The history of his 
boyhood is painfully interesting. Oliver Twist in 
the parish workhouse, Smike at Dotheboys Hall, 
were petted children 'when compared with this 
wretched heir-apparent of a crown. The nature of 
Frederick William was hard and bad, and the habit 
of exercising arbitrary power had made him fright- 
fully savage. His rage constantly vented itself to 
right and left in curses and blows. When his ma- 
jesty took a walk, every human being fled before 
him, as if a tiger had broken loose from a menage- 
rie. If he met a lady in the street, he gave her a 
kick, and told her to go home and mind her brats. 
If he saw a clergyman staring at the soldiers, he 
admonished the reverend gentleman to betake him* 
self to study and prayer, and enforced this pious 
advice by a sound caning, administered on the spot. 
But it was in his own house that he was most un- 
reasonable and ferocious. His palace was hell, and 
he the most execrable of fiends — a cross between 



FREDERIC THE GREAT. 91 

Moloch and Puck. His son Frederic and his 
daughter Wilhelmina, afterwards Margravine of 
Bareuth, were in an especial manner objects of his 
aversion. His own mind was uncultivated. He 
despised literature. He hated infidels, papists, and 
metaphysicians, and did not very well understand in 
what they differed from each other. The business 
of life, according to him, was to drill and to be drill- 
ed. The recreations suited to a piince, were to sit 
in a cloud of tobacco-smoke, to sip Swedish beer 
between the puffs of the pipe, to play backgammon 
for three-halfpence a rubber, to kill wild hogs, and 
to shoot partridges by the thousand. 

FREDERIC THE GREAT. 

He had from the commencement of his reign ap- 
plied himself to public business after a fashion 
unknown among kings. Louis XIV., indeed, had 
been his own prime minister, and had exercised a 
general superintendence over all the departments 
of the government; but this was not sufficient for 
Frederic. He was not content with being his own 
prime minister — he would be his own sole minister, 
tinder him there was no room, not merely for a 
Hichelieu or a Mazarin, but for a Colbert, a Lou- 
vois, or a Torcy. A love of labor for its own sake, 
a restless and insatiable longing to dictate, to inter- 
meddle, to make his power felt, a profound scorn 
and distrust of his fellow creatures, indisposed him 
to ask counsel, to confide important secrets, to dele- 
gate ample powers. The highest functionaries 
under his government were mere clerks, and wera 



99 macaulay's miscellanies. 

not so much trusted by him as valuable clerks are 
often trusted by the heads of departments. He was 
his own treasurer, his own commander-in-chief, his 
own intendant of public works ; his own minister 
for trade and justice, for home affairs and foreign 
affairs ; his own master of the horse, steward, and 
chamberlain. Matters of which no chief of an office 
in any other government would ever hear, were in 
this singular monarchy, decided by the King in 
person. If a traveller wished for a good place to 
see a review, he had to write to Frederic, and 
recjeived next day, from a royal messenger, Freder- 
ic's answer signed by Frederic's own hand. Thi-s 
was an extravagant, a morbid activity. The public 
business would assuredly have been better done if 
each department had been put under a man of 
talents and integrity, and if the King had contented 
himself with a general control. In this manner the 
advantages which belong to unity of design, and the 
advantages which belong to the division of labor, 
would have been to a great extent combined. But 
such a system would not have suited the peculiar 
temper of Frederic. He could tolerate no will, no 
reason in the state, save his own. He wished for 
no abler assistance than that of penmen who had 
just understanding enough to translate, to tran- 
scribe, to make out his scrawls, and to put his con- 
cise Yes and No into an official form. Of the higher 
intellectual faculties, there is as much in a copying 
machine, or a lithographic press, as he required 
from a secretary of the cabinet. 

His own exertions were such as were hardly to 
be expected from a human body, or a human mind. 



FREDERIC THE GREAT. 93: 

At Potsdam, his ordinary residence, he rose at three 
in summer and four in winter. A page soon ap- 
peared, with a large basketful of all the letters 
which had arrived for the King by the last courier — 
despatches from ambassadors, reports from officers 
of revenue, plans of buildings, proposals for draining 
marshes, complaints from persons who thought 
themselves aggrieved, applications from persons 
who wanted titles, military commissions, and civil 
situations. He examined the seals with a keen eye ; 
for he was never for a moment free from the sus- 
picion that some fraud might be practised on him. 
Then he read the letters, divided them into several 
packets, and signified his pleasure, generally by a 
mark, often by two or three words, now and then 
by some cutting epigram. By eight he had gene- 
rally finished this part of his task. The adjutant- 
general was then in attendance, and received in- 
structions for the day as to all the military arrange- 
ments of the kingdom. Then the King went to 
review his guards, not as kings ordinarily review 
their guards, but with the minute attention and 
severity of an old drill-sergeant. In the mean time 
the four cabinet secretaries had been employed in 
answering the letters on which the King had that 
morning signified his will. These unhappy men 
were forced to work all the year round like negro- 
slaves in the time of the sugar-crop. They never 
had a holiday. They never knew what it was to 
dine. It was necessary that, before they stiiTed, 
they should finish the whole of their work. The 
King, always on his guard against treachery, took 
fiom the heap a handful at random, and looked into 



94 macaulay's miscellanies. 

them to see whether his instructions had been 
exactly followed. This was no bad security against 
foul play on the part of the secretaries ; for if one 
of them were detected in a trick, he might think 
himself fortunate if he escaped with five years of 
imprisonment in a dungeon. Frederic then signed 
the replies, and all were sent off the same evening. 
The general principles on which this strange 
government was conducted, deserve attention. The 
policy of Frederic was essentially the same as his 
father's ; but Frederic, while he carried that policy 
to lengths to which his father never thought of car 
rying it, cleared it at the same time from the 
absurdities with which his father had encumbered 
it. The King's first object was to have a gi'eat, 
efficient, and well-trained army. He had a king- 
dom which in extent and population was hardly in 
the second rank of European powers ; and yet he 
aspired to a place not inferior to that of the sove- 
reigns of England, France, and Austria. For that 
end it was necessary that Prussia should be all 
sting. Louis XV., with five times as many subjects 
as Frederic, and more than five times as large a 
revenue, had not a more formidable army. The 
proportion which the soldiers in Prussia bore to the 
people, seems hardly credible. Of the males in the 
vigor of life, a seventh part were probably under 
arms ; and this great force had, by drilling, by re- 
viewing, and by the unsparing use of cane and 
scourge, been taught to perform all evolutions with 
a rapidity and a precision which would have aston- 
ished Villars or Eugene. The elevated feelings 
which are necessary to the best kind of army were 



FREDERIC THE GREAT. 95 

tlien wanting to the Prussian service. In those 
ranks were not found the rehgious and political 
enthusiasm which inspired the pikemen of Crom- 
well — the patriotic ardor, the thirst of glory, the 
devotion to a great leader, which inflamed the Old 
Guard of Napoleon. But in all the mechanical 
parts of the military calling, the Prussians were as 
superior to the English and French troops of that 
day, as the English and French troops to a rustic 
militia. 

Though the pay of the Prussian soldier was 
small, though every rixdollar of extraordinary 
charge was scrutinised by Frederic with a vigilance 
and suspicion such as Mr. Joseph Hume never 
brought to the examination of an army-estimate, the 
expense of such an establishment was, for the means 
of the country, enormous. In order that it might 
not be utterly ruinous, it was necessary that every 
other expense should be cut down to the lowest 
possible point. Accordingly Frederic, though his 
dominions bordered on the sea, had no navy. He 
neither had nor wished to have colonies. His 
judges, his fiscal officers, were meanly paid. His 
ministers at foreign courts walked on foot, or drove 
shabby old carriages till the axletrees gave way. 
Even to his highest diplomatic agents, who resided 
at London and Paris, he allowed less than a thou- 
sand pounds sterling a year. The royal household 
was managed with a frugality unusual in the estab- 
lishments of opulent subjects — unexampled in any 
other palace. The king loved good eating and 
drinking, and during great part of his life took 
pleasui'e in seeing his table surrounded by guests , 



96 macaulay's miscellanies. 

yet the whole charge of his kitchen was brought 
within the sum of two thousand pounds sterling a 
year. He examined every extraordinary item with 
a care which might be thought to suit the mistress 
of a boarding-house better than a great prince. 
When more than four rixdollars were asked of him 
for a hundred oysters, he stormed as if he had 
heard that one of his generals had sold a fortress to 
the Empress-Queen. Not a bottle of champagne 
was uncorked without his express order. The 
game of the royal parks and forests, a serious head 
of expenditure in most kingdoms, was to him a 
source of profit. The whole was farmed out ; and 
though the farmers were almost ruined by their 
contract, the king would grant them no remission. 
His wardrobe consisted of one fine gala dress, which 
lasted him all his life ; of two or three old coats fit 
for Monmouth Street, of yellow waistcoats soiled 
with snuff, and of huge boots embrowned by time. 
One taste alone sometimes allured him beyond the 
limits of parsimony, nay, even beyond the limits of 
prudence — the taste for building. In all other 
things his economy was such as we might call by a 
harsher name, if we did not reflect that his funds 
were drawn from a heavily taxed people, and that 
it was impossible for him, without excessive tyranny, 
to keep up at once a formidable army and a splen- 
did court. 



VOLTAIRE. 97 



VOLTAIRE. 

Potsdam*was, in truth, what it was called by one 
of its most illustrious inmates, the palace of Alcina. 
At the first glance it seemed to be a delightful spot, 
where every intellectual and physical enjoyment 
awaited the happy adventurer. Every new comer 
was received with eager hospitality, intoxicated with 
flattery, encouraged to expect prospeiity and great- 
ness. It was in vain that a long succession of 
favorites who had entered that abode with delight 
and hope, and who, after a short term of delusive 
happiness, had been doomed to expiate their folly 
by years of wretchedness and degradation, raised 
their voices to warn the aspirant who approached 
the charmed threshold. Some had wisdom enough 
to discover the truth early, and spiiit enough to fly 
without looking back ; others lingered on to a cheer- 
less and unhonored old age. We have no hesita- 
tion in saying that the poorest author of that time 
in London, sleeping on a bulk, dining in a cellar, 
with a cravat of paper, and a skewer for a shirt-pin, 
was a happier man than any of the literary inmates 
of Frederic's Court. 

But of all who entered the enchanted garden in 
the inebriation of dehght, and quitted it in agonies 
of rage and shame, the most remarkable was Vol- 
taire. Many circumstances had made him desirous 
of finding a home at a distance from his country. 
His fame had raised him up enemies. His sensi- 
bihty gave them a formidable advantage over him. 
They were, indeed, contemptible assailants. Of all 

• The residence of the Kinga of Truseia. e 



08 macaulay's miscellanies. 

that they wrote against him, nothing has survived 
except vv^hat he has himself preserved. But the 
constitution of his mind resembled the constitution 
of those bodies in which the shghtest scratch of a 
bramble, or the bite of a gnat, never fails to fester. 
Though his reputation was rather raised than low- 
ered by the abuse of such writers as Freron and 
Desfontaines — though the vengeance which he took 
on Freron and Desfontaines was such, that scourging, 
branding, pillorying, would have been a trifle to it 
— there is reason to believe that they gave him far 
more pain than he ever gave them. Though he 
enjoyed during his own lifetime the reputation of a 
classic — though he was extolled by his contempora- 
ries above all poets, philosophers, and historians — 
though his works were read with as much delight 
and admiration at Moscow and Westminster, at 
Florence and Stockholm, as at Paris itself, he was 
yet tormented by that restless jealousy which should 
seem to belong only to minds burning with the de- 
sire of fame, and yet conscious of impotence. To 
men of letters who could by no possibility be his 
rivals, he was, if they behaved well to him, not 
merely just, not merely courteous, but often a 
hearty friend and a munificent benefactor. But to 
every writer who rose to a celebrity approaching 
his own, he became either a disguised or an avowed 
enemy. He slyly depreciated Montesquieu and 
Buffon. He publicly, and with violent outrage, 
made war on Jean Jacques. Nor had he the art 
of hiding his feelings under the semblance of good- 
humor or of contempt. "With all his great talents, 
and all his long experience of the world, he had no 



VOLTAIRE. 99 

more self-command than a petted child or a hyster- 
ical woman. Whenever he was mortified, he ex- 
hausted the whole rhetoric of anger and sorrow to 
express his mortification. His torrents of bitter 
words — his stamping and cursing — his grimaces 
and his tears of rage — were a rich feast to those 
abject natures, whose delight is in the agonies of 
powerful spirits and in the abasement of immortal 
names. These creatures had now found out a way 
of galling him to the very quick. In one walk, at 
least, it had been admitted by envy itself that he 
was without a living competitor. Since Racine had 
been laid among the great men whose dust made 
the holy precinct of Port-Royal holier, no' tragic 
poet had appeared who could contest the palm with 
the author of Zaire, of Jllzirey and of JMerojje. At 
length a rival was announced. Old Crebillon, who, 
many years before, had obtained some theatrical 
success, and who had long been forgotten, came 
forth from his garret in one of the meanest lanes 
near the Rue St. Antoine, and was welcomed by 
the acclamations of envious men of letters, and of a 
ca^Dricious populace. A thing called Calaline, which 
he had written in his retirement, was acted with 
boundless applause. Of this execrable piece it is 
sufficient to say, that the plot turns on a love affair, 
carried on in all the forms of Scudery, between 
Catiline, whose confidant is the Pr8etor Lentulus, 
and Tullia, the daughter of Cicero. The theatre 
resounded with acclamations. The king pensioned 
the successful poet ; and the coffee-houses pro- 
nounced that Voltaire was a clever man, but that 
the real tragic inspiration, the celestial fire which 



100 macaulay's miscellanies. 

glowed in Corneille and Racine, was to be found 
in Crebillon alone. 

The blow went to Voltaire's heart. Had his 
wisdom and fortitude been in proportion to the fer- 
tility of his intellect, and to the brilliancy of his wit, 
he would have seen that it was out of the power of 
all the puffers and detractors in Europe to put Cat- 
iline above Zaire ; but he had none of the magnan- 
imous patience with which Milton and Bentley left 
their claims to the unerring judgment of time. He 
eagerly engaged in an undignified competition with 
Crebillon, and produced a series of plays on the 
same subjects which his rival had treated. These 
pieces were coolly received. Angry with the court, 
angry with the capital, Voltaire began to find plea- 
sure in the prospect of exile. His attachment for 
Madame de Chatelet long prevented him from exe- 
cuting his purpose. Her death set him at liberty ; 
and he determined to take refuge at Berlin. 

To Berlin he was invited by a series of letters, 
couched in terms of the most enthusiastic friendship 
and admiration. For once the rigid parsimony of 
Frederic seemed to have relaxed. Orders, honora- 
ble offices, a liberal pension, a well-served table, 
stately apartments under a royal roof, were offered 
in return for the pleasure and honor which were 
expected from the society of the first wit of the age. 
A thousand louis were remitted for the charges of 
the journey. No ambassador setting out from Bei« 
lin for a court of the first rank, had ever been more 
amply supplied. But Voltaire was not satisfied. 
At a later period, when he possessed an ample for- 
tune, he was one of the most liberal of men ; but 



VOtTAIRfi. ' 101 

till iiis means had become equal to his wishes, hia 
greediness for lucre was unrestrained either by jus- 
tice or by shame. He had the effrontery to ask for 
a thousand louis more, in order to enable him to 
bring his niece, Madame Denis, the ugliest of co- 
quettes, in his company. The indelicate rapacity 
of the poet produced its natural effect on the severe 
and frugal king. The answer was a dry refusal. 
" I did not," said his Majesty, ** solicit the honor of 
the lady's society." On this, Voltaire went off in a 
paroxysm of childish rage. " Was there ever such 
avarice 1 He has hundreds of tubs full of dollars in 
his vaults, and haggles with me about a poor thou- 
sand louis." It seemed that the negotiation would 
be broken off; but Frederic, wdth great dexterity, 
affected indifference, and seemed inclined to trans- 
fer his idolatry to Baculard d'Arnaud. His Majesty 
even wrote some bad verses, of which the sense 
was, that Voltaire was a setting sun, and that Ar- 
naud was rising. Good-natured friends soon carried 
the lines to Voltaire. He was in his bed. He 
jumped out in his shirt, danced about the room 
with rage, and sent for his passport and his post- 
horses. It was not difficult to foresee the end of a 
connection which had such a beginning. 

It was in the year 1750 that Voltaire left the 
great capital, which he was not to see again till, 
after the lapse of nearly thirty years, he returned, 
bowed down by extreme old age, to die in the midst 
of a splendid and ghastly triumph. His reception 
in Prussia was such as might well have elated a 
less vain and excitable mind. He wrote to his 
friends at Paris, that the kindness and the attention 



102 MACAULAY's MISCtiLLANiES, 

with which he had been welcomed surpassed de* 
scription — that the king was the most amiable of 
men — -that Potsdam was the Paradise of philoso 
phers. He was created chamberlain, and received, 
together with his gold key, the cross of an order, 
and a patent ensuring to him a pension of eight 
hundred pounds sterling a year for life. A hundred 
and sixty pounds a year were promised to his niece 
if she survived him. The royal cooks and coach- 
men were put at his disposal. He was lodged in 
the same apartments in which Saxe had lived, when, 
at the height of power and glory, he visited Prussia. 
Frederic, indeed, stooped for a time even to use the 
language of adulation. He pressed to his lips the 
meagre hand of the little grinning skeleton, whom 
he regarded as the dispenser of immortal renown. 
He would add, he said, to the titles which he owed 
to his ancestors and his sword, another title, derived 
from his last and proudest acquisition. His style 
should run thus : — -Frederic, King of Prussia, Mar- 
grave of Brandenburg, Sovereign Duke of Silesia, 
Possessor of Voltaire. But even amid the delights 
of the honey-moon, Voltaire's sensitive vanity beg^n 
to take alarm. A few days after his arrival, he 
could not help telling his niece, that the amiable 
king had a trick of giving a sly scratch with one 
band while patting and stroking with the other. 
Soon came hints not the less alarming because mys- 
terious. " The supper parties are -delicious. The 
king is the life of the company. But — I have 
operas and comedies, reviews and concerts, my 
studies and books. But — but — Berlin is fine, the 
princess charming, the maids of honor handsome. 
But" 



VOLTAIRE. 103 

This eccentric friendship was fast cooling. Never 
had there met two persons so exquisitely fitted to 
plague each other. Each of them had exactly the 
fault of which the other was most impatient ; and 
they were, in different ways, the most impatient of 
mankind. Frederic was frugal, almost niggardly. 
When he had secured his plaything, he began to 
think that he had bought it too dear. Voltaire, on 
the other hand, was greedy, even to the extent of 
impudence and knavery; and conceived that the 
favorite of a monarch, who had barrels full of gold 
and silver laid up in his cellars, ought to make a 
fortune which a receiver-general might envy. They 
soon discovered each other's feelings. Both were 
angry, and a war began, in which Frederic stoop- 
ed to the part of Harpagon, and Voltaire to that of 
Scapin. It is humiliating to relate, that the great 
warrior and statesman gave orders that his guest's 
allowance of sugar and chocolate should be curtail- 
ed. It is, if possible, a still more humiliating fact, 
that Voltaire indemnified him_self by pocketing the 
wax-candles in the royal antechamber. Disputes 
about money, however, were not the most seiious 
disputes of these extraordinary associates. The 
sarcasms soon galled the sensitive temper of the 
poet. D'Arnaud and D'Argens, Guichard and La 
Metrie, might, for the sake of a morsel of bread, be 
willing to bear the insolence of a master ; but Vol- 
taire was of another order. He knew that he was 
a potentate as well as Frederic; that his European 
reputation, and his incomparable power of covering 
whatever he hated with ridicule, made him an object 
of dread even to the leaders of armies and the rulers 



1G4 macaulay's miscellanies. 

of nations. In truth, of all the intellectual weapons 
which have ever been wielded by man, the most 
terrible was the mockery of Voltaire. Bigots and 
tyrants, who had never been moved by the wailing 
and cursing of millions, turned pale at his name. 
Principles unassailable by reason, principles which 
had withstood the fiercest attacks of power, the most 
valuable truths, the most generous sentiments, the 
noblest and most graceful images, the purest repu- 
tations, the most august institutions, began to look 
mean and loathsome as soon as that withering smile 
was turned upon them. To eveiy opponent, how- 
ever strong in his cause and his talents, in his station 
and his character, who ventured to encounter the 
great scoffer, might be addressed the caution which 
was given of old to the Archangel :■ — 

" I forewarn thee, shun 
His deadly arrow ; neither vainly hope 
To be invulnerable in those bright arms, 
Though temper'd heavenly ; for tbat fatal dint, 
Save Him who reigns above, none can resist." 

We cannot pause to recount how often that rare 
talent was exercised against rivals worthy of esteem 
— how often it was used to crush and torture ene- 
mies worthy only of silent disdain — how often it 
was perverted to the more noxious purpose of de- 
stroying the last solace of earthly misery, and the 
last restraint on earthly power. Neither can we 
pause to tell how often it was used to vindicate jus- 
tice, humanity, and toleration — the principles of 
sound philosophy, the principles of free government. 
This is not the place for a full character of Voltaire. 



SAMUEL CRISP. 10^ 



ANECDOTE OF GAKRICK. 



Garrick, too, was a frequent visitor in Poland 
Street and St. Martin's Lane. That wonderful ac- 
tor loved the society of children, partly from good- 
nature, and partly from vanity. The ecstacies of 
mirth and terror which his gestures and play of 
countenance never failed to produce in a nursery, 
flattered him quite as much as the applause of ma- 
ture critics. He often exhibited all his powers of 
mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, 
awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he 
saw a ghost, scared them by raving Hke a maniac 
in St. Luke's, and then at once became an auction- 
eer, a chimney-sweeper, or an old woman, and 
made them laugh till the tears ran down their 
cheeks. 

*MR. SAMUEL CRISP. 

Long before Frances Burney was born, Mr. Crisp 
had made his entrance into the world with every 
advantage. He was well connected and well edu- 
cated. His face and figure were conspicuously 
handsome ; his manners were polished ; his fortune 
was easy ; his character was without stain ; he lived 
in the best society ; he had read much ; he talked 
well ; his taste in literature, music, painting, archi- 
tecture, sculpture, was held in high esteem. No- 
thing that the world can give seemed to be wanting 
to his happiness and respectability, except that he 
should understand the limits of his poweis, and 

E* 



106 MAC AUL ay's miscellanies. 

should not throw away distinctions which were 
within his reach, in the j)ursuit of distinctions which 
were unattainable. 

'' It is an uncontrolled truth," says Swift, *' that 
no man ever made an ill figure who understood his 
own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.'* 
Every day brings with it- fresh illustrations of this 
weighty saying; but the best commentary that we 
remember is the history of Samuel Crisp. Men like 
him have their proper place, and it is a most im- 
portant one in the Commonwealth of Letters. It is 
by the judgment of such men that the rank of 
authors is finally determined. It is neither to the 
multitude, nor to the few who are gifted with great 
creative genius, that we are to look for sound criti- 
cal decisions. The multitude, unacquainted with 
the best models, are captivated by whatever stuns 
and dazzles them. They deserted Mrs. Siddons to 
run after Master Betty ; and they now prefer, we 
have no doubt, Jack Sheppard to Von Artevelde. 
A man of great original genius, on the other hand, 
a man who has attained to mastery in some high 
walk of art, is by no means to be implicitly trusted 
as a judge of the performances of others. The erro- 
neous decisions pronounced by such men are with- 
out number. It is commonly supposed that jealousy 
makes them unjust. But a more creditable expla- 
nation may easily be found. The very excellence 
of a work shows that some of the faculties of the 
author have been developed at the expense of the 
rest ; for it is not given to the human intellect to 
expand itself widely in all directions at once, and 
to be at the same time gigantic and well-proporiion- 



MR. SAMUEL CRISP. 107 

ed. Whoever becomes pre-eminent in any art, nay, 
in any style of art, generally does so by devoting 
himself with intense and exclusive enthusiasm to 
the pursuit of one kind of excellence. His percep- 
tion of other kinds of excellence is therefore too 
often impaired. Out of his own department he 
praises and blames at random, and is far less to be 
trusted than the mere connoisseur, who produces 
nothing, and whose business is only to judge and 
enjoy. One painter is distinguished by his exquisite 
finishing. He toils day after day to bring the veins 
of a cabbage-leaf, the folds of a lace veil, the 
wrinkles of an old woman's face, nearer and nearer 
to perfection. In the time which he employs on a 
square foot of canvass, a master of a different order 
covers the walls of a palace with gods burying 
giants under mountains, or makes the cupola of a 
church alive with seraphim and martyrs. The 
more fervent the passion of each of these artists for 
his art, the higher the merit of each in his own line, 
the more unlikely it is that they Mdll justly appreci- 
ate each other. Many persons who never handled 
a pencil, probably do far more justice to Michael 
Angelo than would have been done by Gerhard 
Douw, and far more justice to Gerhard Douw than 
would have been done by Michael Angelo. 

It is the same with literature. Thousands who 
have no spark of the genius of Dryden or "Words- 
worth, do to Dryden the justice which has never 
been done by Wordsworth, and to Wordsworth the 
justice which, we suspect, would never have been 
done by Dryden. Gray, Johnson, Richardson, 
Fielding, are all highly esteemed by the great body 



108 macaulay's miscellanies. 

of intelligent and well-informed men. But Gray 
could see no merit in Rasselas ; and Johnson could 
see no merit in the Bard. Fielding thought Rich- 
ardson a solemn prig ; and Richardson perpetually 
expressed contempt and disgust for Fielding's 
lowness. 

Mr. Crisp seems, as far as we can judge, to have 
been a man eminently qualified for the useful office 
of a connoisseur. His talents and knowledge fitted 
him to appreciate justly almost every species of in- 
tellectual superiority. As an adviser he was inesti- 
mable. Nay, he might probably have held a 
respectable rank as a wiiter if he would have con- 
fined himself to some department of literature^ in 
which nothing more than sense, taste, and reading 
was required. Unhappily he set his heart on being 
a great poet, wrote a tragedy in five acts on the 
death of Virginia, and offered it to Garrick, who 
was his personal friend. Garrick read it, shook his 
head, and expressed a doubt whether it would be 
wise in Mr. Crisp to stake a reputation, which stood 
high, on the success of such a piece. But the author, 
blinded by self-love, set in motion a machinery such 
as none could long resist. His intercessors were 
the most eloquent man and the most lovely woman 
of that generation. Pitt was induced to read Vir- 
ginia, and to pronounce it excellent. Lady Coven- 
try, with fingers which might have furnished a 
model to sculptors, forced the manuscript into the 
reluctant hand of the manager ; and, in the year 
1754, the play was brought forward. 

Nothing that skill or friendship . could do was 
omitted. Garrick wrote both prologue and epilogue. 



MR. SAMUEL CRISP. 109 

The zealous friends of the author filled every box ; 
and, by their strenuous exertions, the life of the 
play was prolonged during ten nights. But, though 
there was no clamorous reprobation, it was univer- 
sally felt that the attempt had failed. When Vir- 
ginia was printed, the public disappointment was 
even greater than at the representation. The 
critics, the Monthly Reviewers in particular, fell on 
plot, characters, and diction without mercy, but, we 
fear, not without justice. We have never met with 
a copy of the play ; but, if we may judge from the 
lines which are extracted in the Gentleman's Maga- 
zine, and which do not appear to have been ma- 
levolently selected, we should say that nothing but 
the acting of Garrick, and the partiality of the 
audience, could have saved so feeble and unnatural 
a drama from instant damnation. 

The ambition of the poet was still unsubdued. 
When the London season closed, he applied him- 
self vigorously to the work of removing blemishes. 
He does not seem to have suspected, what we are 
strongly inclined to suspect, that the whole piece 
was one blemish, and that the passages which were 
meant to be fine, were, in truth, bursts of that tame 
extravagance into which writers fall, when they set 
themselves to be sublime and pathetic in spite of 
nature. He omitted, added, retouched, and flatter- 
ed himself with hopes of a complete success in the 
following year ; but, in the following year, Garrick 
showed no disposition to bring the amended trage- 
dy on the stage. Solicitation and remonstrance 
wer%tried in vain. Lady Coventry, drooping under 
tilit malady which seems ever to select what is 



110 macaulay's miscellanies. 

lovllest for its prey, could render no assistance. 
The manager's language was civilly evasive, but his 
resolution was inflexible. 

Crisp had committed a great error ; but he had 
escaped with a very slight penance. His play had 
not been hooted from the boards. It had, on the 
contrary, been better received than many very esti- 
mable performances have been — than Johnson's 
Irene, for example, and Goldsmith's Good-Natured 
Man. Had Crisp been wise, he would have thought 
himself happy in having purchased self-knowledge 
so cheap. He would have relinquished without 
vain repinings the hope of poetical distinction, and 
would have turned to the many sources of happi- 
ness which he still possessed. Had he been, on the 
other hand, an unfeeling and. unblushing dunce, he 
would have gone on writing scores of bad tragedies 
in defiance of censure and derision. But he had 
too much sense to risk a second defeat, yet too little 
to bear his first defeat like a man. The fatal delu- 
sion that he was a great dramatist had takea firm 
possession of his mind. His failure he attributed 
to every cause except the true one. He complain- 
ed of the ill-will of Garrick, who appears to have 
done every thing that ability and zeal could do; 
and who, from selfish motives, would of course have 
been well pleased if Virginia had been as success- 
ful as the Beggar's Opera. Nay, Crisp complained 
of the languor of the friends whose partiality had 
given him three benefit-nights to which he had no 
claim. He complained of the injustice of the spec- 
tators, when, in truth, he ought to have been grate- 
ful for their unexampled patience. He lost j|||( 



MR. SAMUEL CRISP. Ill 

temper and spirits, and became a cynic and a hater 
of mankind. From London he retired to Hampton, 
and from Hampton to a solitary and long-deserted 
mansion, built on a common in one of the wildest 
tracts of Surrey. No road, not even a sheep-walk, 
connected his lonely dwelhng with the abodes of 
men. The place of his retreat was strictly con- 
cealed from his old associates. In the spring he 
sometimes emerged, and was seen at exhibitions 
and concerts in London. But he soon disappeared 
and hid himself, with no society but his books, in 
his dreary hermitage. He survived his failure about 
thirty years. A new generation sprang up around 
him. No memory of his bad verses remained 
among him. How completely the world had lost 
sight of him, will appear from a single circumstance. 
We looked for his name in a copious Dictionary of 
Dramatic Authors published while he was still alive, 
and we found only that Mr. Samuel Crisp, of the 
Custom-House, had written a play called Virginia, 
acted in 1754. To the last, however, the unhappy 
man continued to brood over the injustice of the 
manager and the pit, and tried to convince himself 
and others that he had missed the highest literary 
honors only because he had omitted some fine pas- 
sages in compliaace with Garrick's judgment. Alas, 
for human nature ! that the wounds of vanity should 
smart and bleed so much longer than the wounds 
of affection ! Few people, we believe, whose near- 
est friends and relations died in 1754, had any acute 
feeling of the loss in 1782. Dear sisters and favor- 
ite daughters, and brides snatched away before the 
honey-moon was passed, had been forgotten, or 



112 MAGAULAY's MISCELLANIEg. 

were remembered only with a tranquil regret. But 
Samuel Crisp was still mourning for his tragedy 
like Rachel weeping for her children, and would 
not be comforted. " Never," such was his language 
twenty-eight years after his disaster, " never give 
up or alter a tittle unless it perfectly coincides with 
your own inward feelings. I can say this to my 
sorrow and my cost. But, mum !" Soon after 
these words were written, his life — a life which 
might have been eminently useful and happy — 
ended in the same gloom in which, during more 
than a quarter of a century, it had been jjassed. 
We have thought it worth while to rescue from 
oblivion this curious fragment of literary history. It 
seems to us at once ludicrous, melancholy, and full 
of instruction. 

CHARACTER OF MISS BURNEY'S (MADAME D'AR 
BLAY) WRITINGS. 

Madame D'Arblay has left us scarcely any thing 
but humors. Almost every one of her men and 
women has some one propensity developed to a 
morbid degree. In Cecilia, for example, Mr. Del- 
ville never opens his lips without some allusion to 
his own birth and station ; or Mr. Briggs, without 
some allusion to the hoarding of money; or Mr, 
Hobson, without betraying the self-indulgence and 
self-importance of a purse-proud upstart ; or Mr. 
Simkins, without uttering some sneaking remark 
for the purpose of currying favor with his customers; 
or Mr. Meadows, without expressing apathy and 
weariness of life j or Mr. Albany without declaim- 



MADAME d'aRBLAY. 113 

ing about the vices of the rich and the misery of the 
poor ; or Mrs. Belfield, without some indelicate eu- 
logy on her son ; or Lady Margaret, without indi- 
cating jealousy of her husband. Morrice is all 
skipping, officious impertinence, Mr. Gosport all 
sarcasm, Lady Honoria all lively prattle, Miss La- 
rolles all silJy prattle. If ever Madame D'Arblay 
aimed at more, as in the character of Monckton, we 
do not think that she succeeded well. 

We are, therefore, forced to refuse Madame 
D'Arblay a place in the highest rank of art; but 
we cannot deny that, in the rank to which she be- 
longed, she had few equals, and scarcely any supe- 
rior. The variety of humors which is to be found 
in her novels is immense ; and though the talk of 
each person separately is monotonous, the general 
effect is not monotony, but a very lively and agree- 
able diversity. Her plots are rudely constructed 
and improbable, if we consider them in themselves. 
But they are admirably framed for the purpose of 
exhibiting striking groups of eccentric characters, 
each governed by his own peculiar whim, each 
talking his own peculiar jargon, and each bringing 
out by opposition the peculiar oddities of all the 
rest. We will give one example out of many which 
occur to us. All probability is violated in order to 
bring Mr, Delvile, Mr. Briggs, Mr. Hobson, and Mr. 
Albany into a room together. But when we have 
them there, we soon forget probability in the exqui- 
sitely ludicrous effect which is produced by the 
conflict of four old fools, each raging with a mono- 
mania of his own, each talking a dialect of his own, 
and each inflaming all the others anew every time 
he opens his mouth. 



114 macaulay's miscellanies. 

Madame D'Arblay was most successful in come 
dy, and indeed in comedy which bordered on farce 
But we are inclined to infer from some passages, 
both in Cecilia and Camilla, that she might have 
attained equal distinction in the pathetic. W© 
have formed this judgment less from those ambi 
tious scences of distress which lie near the catas- 
trophe of each of those novels than from some 
exquisite strokes of natural tenderness which take 
us here and there by surprise. We would mention 
as examples, Mrs. Hill's account of her little boy's 
death in Cecilia, and the parting of Sir Hugh 
Tyrold and Camilla, when the honest baronet thinks 
himself dying. 

It is melancholy to think that the whole fame of 
Madame D'Arblay rests on what she did during the 
early half of her life, and that every thing which 
she published during the forty-three years which 
preceded her death, lowered her reputation. Yet 
we have no reason to think that at the time when 
her faculties ought to have been in their maturity, 
they were smitten with any blight. In the Wan- 
derer, we catch now and then a gleam of her genius. 
Even in the Memoirs of her Father, there is no 
trace of dotage. They are very bad ; but they are 
so, as it seems to us, not from a decay of power, but 
from a total perversion of power. 

The truth is, that Madame D'Arblay's style 
underwent a gradual and most pernicious change — 
a change which, in degree at least, we believe to 
be unexampled in literary history, and of which it 
may be useful to trace the progress. 

When she wrote her letters to Mr. Crisp, her 



MADAME d'aRBLAY. 115 

early journals, and the novel of Evelina, her style 
was not indeed brilliant or energetic; but it was 
easy, clear, and free from all offensive faults. 
When she Avrote Cecilia she aimed higher. She 
had then lived much in a circle of which Johnson 
was the centre ; and she was herself one of his most 
submissive worshippers. It seems never to have 
crossed her mind that the style even of his best 
writings was by no means faultless, and that even 
had it been faultless, it might not be wise in her to 
imitate it. Phraseology which is proper in a dis- 
quisition on the Unities, or in a preface to a diction- 
ary, may be quite out of place in a tale of fashionable 
life. Old gentlemen do not criticise the reigning 
modes, nor do young gentlemen make love with the 
balanced epithets and sonorous cadences which, on 
occasions of great dignity, a skilful writer may use 
with happy effect. 

In an evil hour the authoress of Evelina took the 
"Rambler for her model. This would not have been 
wise even if she could have imitated her pattern as 
well as Hawkesworth did. But such imitation was 
beyond her power. She had her own style. It 
was a tolerably good one ; one which might, without 
any violent change, have been improved into a very 
good one. She determined to throw it away, and to 
adopt a style in which she could attain excellence 
only by achieving an almost miraculous victory over 
nature and over habit. She could cease to be Fanny 
Burney; it was not po easy to become Samuel 
Johnson. 

In Cecilia the change of manner began to appear. 
But in Cecilia the imitation of Johnson, though not 



116 macatilay's miscellanies. 

always in the best taste, is sometimes eminently 
happy ; and the passages which are so verbose as 
to be positively offensive, are few. There were 
people who whispered that Johnson had assisted 
his young friend, and that the novel owed all its 
finest passages to his hand. This was merely a 
fabrication of envy. Miss Barney's real excellences 
were as much beyond the reach of Johnson as his 
real excellences were beyond her reach. He could 
no more have written the masquerade scene, or the 
Vauxhall scene, than she could have written the 
Life of Cowley or the Review of Soame Jenyns. 
But we have not the smallest doubt that he revised 
Cecilia, and that he retouched the style of many 
passages. We know that he was in the habit of 
giving assistance of this kind most freely. Gold- 
smith, Hawkesworth, Boswell, Lord Hailes, Mrs. 
Williams, were among those who obtained his help. 
Nay, he even corrected the poetry of Mr. Crabbe, 
whom, we believe, he had never seen. When Miss 
Burney thought of writing a comedy, he promised 
to give her his best counsel, though he owned that 
he was not particularly well qualified to advise on 
matters relating to the stage. We therefore think 
it in the highest degree improbable that his little 
Fanny, when living in habits of the most affectionate 
intercourse with him, would have brought out an 
important work without consulting him ; and, when 
we look into Cecilia, we see such traces of his hand 
in the grave and elevated passages as it is impossi- 
ble to mistake. 

When next Madame D'Arblay appeared before 
the world as a writer, she was in a very different 



MADAME d'aRBLAY. 117 

situation. She would not content herself with the 
simple English in which Evelina had been written. 
She had no longer the friend who, we are confident, 
had polished and strengthened the style of Cecilia. 
She had to write in Johnson's manner without 
Johnson's aid. The consequence yyas, that in 
Camilla every passage which she meant to be fine 
is detestable ; and that the book has been saved 
from condemnation only by the admirable spirit and 
force of those scenes in which she was content to 
be familiar. 

But there was to be a still deeper descent. After 
the publication of Camilla, Madame D'Arblay re- 
sided ten years at Paris. During those years there 
was scarcely any intercourse between France and 
England. It waS with difficulty that a short letter 
could occasionally be ti^ansmitted. All Madame 
D'Arblay's companions were French. She must 
have written, spoken, thought, in French. Ovid 
expressed his fear that a shorter exile might have 
affected the purity of his Latin. During a shorter 
exile. Gibbon unlearned his native English. Ma- 
dame D'Arblay had carried a bad style to France. 
She brought back a style which we are really at a 
loss to describe. It is a sort of broken Johnsonese, 
a barbarous patois^ bearing the same relation to the 
language of Rasselas which the gibberish of the 
negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the 
House of Lords. Sometim^es it reminds us of the 
finest, that is to say, the vilest parts, of Mr. Gait's 
novels; sometimes of the perorations of Exeter 
Hall ; sometimes of the leading articles of the Morn- 
ing Post. But it most resembles the puffs of Mr. 



118 macaulay's miscellanies. 

Rowland and Dr. Gross. It matters not what ideas 
are clothed in such a style. The genius of Shak- 
speare and Bacon united would not save a work so 
written from derision. 

ADDISON'S VISIT TO BOILEAU. 

Addison's modesty restrained him from fully re 
lating the circumstances of his introduction to 
Boileau. Boileau, having survived the friends and 
rivals of his youth, old, deaf, and melancholy, lived 
in retirement, seldom went either to court or to the 
academy, and was almost inaccessible to strangers. 
Of the English and of English literature he knew 
nothing. He had hardly heard the name of Dry- 
den. Some of our countrymen, in the warmth of 
their patriotism, have asserted that this ignorance 
must have been affected. We own that we see no 
ground for such a supposition. English literature 
was to the French of the age of Louis XIV. what 
German literature was to our own grandfathers. 
Very few, we suspect, of the accomplished men who, 
sixty or seventy years ago, used to dine in Leicester 
Square with Sir Joshua, or at Streatham with Mrs. 
Thrale, had the shghtest notion that Wieland was 
one of the first wits and poets, and Lessing, beyond 
all dispute, the first critic in Europe. Boileau knew 
just as little about the " Paradise Lost," and about 
" Absalom and Ahitophel ;" but he had read Addi- 
son's Latin poems, and admired them greatly. 
They had given him, he said, quite a new notion of 
the state of learning and taste among the English. 
Johnson will have it that these praises are insincere. 



Addison's visit to boileau. 119 

" Nothing," says he, " is better known of Boileau 
than that he had an injudicious and peevish con- 
tempt of modern Latin; and therefore his profession 
of regard was probably the effect of his civility 
rather than approbation." Now nothing is better 
known of Boileau than that he was singularly 
sparing of compliments. We do not remember 
that either friendship or fear ever induced him to 
bestow praise on any composition v/hich he did not 
approve. On literary questions, his caustic, disdain- 
ful, and self-confident spirit rebelled against that 
authority to which every thing else in France bowed 
down. He had the spirit to tell Louis XIV. firmly, 
and even rudely, that his majesty knew nothing about 
poetry, and admired verses which were detestable. 
What was there in Addison's position that could in- 
duce the satirist, whose stern and fastidious temper 
had been the dread of two generations, to turn 
sycophant for the first and last time ? Nor wag 
Boileau's contempt of modern Latin either injudi- 
cious or peevish. He thought, indeed, that no poem 
of the first order would ever be written in a dead 
language. And did he think amiss ? Has not the 
experience of centuries confirmed his opinion 1 
Boileau also thought it probable that, in the best 
modern Latin, a writer of the Augustan age would 
have detected ludicrous improprieties. And who 
can think otherwise ? What modern scholar can 
honestly declare that he sees the smallest impurity 
in the style of Livy? Yet is it not certain that, in 
the style of Livy, Pollio, whose taste had been 
formed on the banks of the Tiber, detected the in- 
elegant idiom of the Po ] Has any modern scholar 



ISO macaulay's miscellanies. 

understood Latin better than Frederic the Great 
understood French 1 Yet is is not notorious that 
Frederic the Great, after reading, speaking, wri- 
ting French, and nothing but French, during more 
than half a century — -after unlearning his mother 
tongue in order to learn French, after living famil 
iarly during many years with French associates — 
could not, to the last, compose in French, without 
imminent risk of committing some mistake which 
would have moved a smile in the literary circles of 
Paris 1 Do we believe that Erasmus and Fracas- 
torius wrote Latin as well as Dr. Robertson and 
Sir Walter Scott wrote English '? And are there 
not in the Dissertation on India, (the last of Dr. 
Robertson's works,) in Waverley, in Marmion, 
Scotticisms at which a London apprentice would 
laugh ? But does it follow, because we think thus, 
that we can find nothing to admire in the noble 
alcaics of Gray, or in the playful elegiacs of Vincent 
Bourne ? Surely not. Nor was Boileau so igno- 
rant or tasteless as to be incapable of appreciating 
good modem Latin. In the very letter to which 
Johnson alludes, Boileau says — " Ne croyez paa 
pourtant que je veuille par la blamer les vers Latins 
que vous m'avez envoyes d'un de vos illustres 
academiciens. Je les ai trouves fort beaux, et dignes 
de Vida et de Sannazar, mais non pas d'Horace et 
de Virgile." Several poems, in modern Latin, have 
been praised by Boileau quite as liberally as it was 
his habit to praise any thing. He says, for exam- 
ple, of Pere Fraguier's epigrams, that Catullus 
seems to have come to life again. But the best 
proof that Boileau did not feel the undiscerning 



Addison's visit to boileau. 121 

contempt for modern Latin verses which has been 
imputed to him, is, that he wjtote and pubHshed 
Latin verses in several metres. Indeed, it hap- 
pens, curiously enough, that the most severe cen- 
sure ever pronounced by him on modern Latin, is 
conveyed in Latin hexametres. We allude to the 
fragment which begins — 

« Quid numeis iterum me balbutire Latinis, 
Longe Alpes citra natum de patre Sicambro, 
Musa, jubes ?" 

For these reasons we feel assured that the praise 
which Boileau bestowed on the Machince. Gesticiir- 
lantes, and the Gerano-Pygmceomachia, was sincere. 
He certainly opened himself to Addison with a 
freedom which was a sure indication of esteem. 
Literature was the chief subject of conversation. 
The old man talked on his favorite theme much 
and well ; indeed, as his young hearer thought, in- 
comparably well. Boileau had undoubtedly some 
of the qualities of a great" critic. He wanted imagi- 
nation, but he had strong sense. His literary code 
was formed on narrow principles ; but in applying 
it, he showed great judgment and penetration. In 
mere style, abstracted from the ideas of which style 
is the garb, his taste was excellent. He was well 
acquainted with the great Greek writers ; and, 
though unable fully to appreciate their creative ge- 
nius, admired the majestic simplicity of their man- 
ner, and had learned from them to despise bombast 
and tinsel. It is easy, we think, to discover, in the 
" Spectator'' and the " Guai'dian," traces of the in- 



122 macaulay's miscellanies. 

fluence, in part salutary and in part pernicious, 
which the mind of Boileau had on the mind of Ad- 
dison. 

ORIGIN OF ADDISON'S CATO.— ANECDOTE. 

At Venice, then the gayest spot in Europe, the 
traveller spent the Carnival, the gayest season of 
the year, in the midst of masques, dances, and sere- 
nades. Here he Vv'as at once diverted and provoked 
by the absurd dramatic pieces which then disgraced 
the Italian stage. To one of those pieces, however, 
he was indebted for a valuable hint. He was pre- 
sent when a ridiculous play on the death of Cato 
was performed. Cato, it seems, was in love with a 
daughter of Scipio. The lady had given her heart 
to Caesar. The rejected lover determined to destroy 
himself. He appeared seated in his library, a 
dagger in his hand, a Plutarch and a Tasso before 
him ; and, in this position, he pronounced a solilo- 
quy before he struck the blow. We are surprised 
that so remarkable a circumstance as this should 
have escaped the notice of all Addison's biographers. 
There cannot, we conceive, be the smallest doubt 
that this scene, in spite of its absurdities and ana- 
chronisms, struck the traveller's imagination, and 
suggested to him the thought of bringing Cato on 
the English stage. It is well known that about this 
time he began his tragedy, and that he finished the 
first four acts before he returned to England. 



CHARACTER OP ADDISON. 128 



CHARACTER OF ADDISON. 

To the influence which Addison derived from his 
literary talents, was added all the influence which 
arises from character. The world, always ready to 
think the worst of needy political adventurers, was 
forced to make one exception. Restlessness, vio- 
lence, audacity, laxity of principle, are the vices 
ordinarily attributed to that class of men. But fac- 
tion itself could not deny that Addison had, through 
all changes of fortune, been strictly faithful to his 
early opinions, and to his early friends ; that his 
integrity was without stain ; that his whole deport- 
ment indicated a fine sense of the becoming; that, in 
the utmost heat of controversy, his zeal was tem- 
pered by a regard for truth, humanity, and social 
decorum ; that no outrage could ever provoke him 
to retaliation unworthy of a Christian and a gentle- 
man ; and that his only faults were a too sensitive 
delicacy, and a modesty which amounted to bash- 
fulness. 

He was undoubtedly one of the most popular 
men of his time ; and much of his popularity he 
owed, we believe, to that very timidity which his 
friends lamented. That timidity often prevented 
him from exhibiting his talents to the best advan- 
tage. But it propitiated Nemesis. It averted that 
envy which would otherwise have been excited by 
fame so splendid, and by so rapid an elevation. No 
man is so great a favorite v^dth the public, as he who 
is at once an object of admiration, of respect, and 
of pity J and such were the feelings which Addison 



124 macaulay's miscellanies. 

inspired. Those who enjoyed the privilege of hear- 
ing his famihar conversation, declared with one 
voice that it was superior even to his writings. 
The brilliant Mary Montagu said, that she had 
known all the wits, and that Addison was the best 
company in the world. The malignant Pope was 
forced to own, that there was a charm in Addison's 
talk which could be found nowhere else. Swift, 
when burning with animosity against the whigs, 
could not but confess to Stella, that, after all, he 
had never known any associate so agreeable as Ad- 
dison. Steele, an excellent judge of lively conver- 
sation, said, that the conversation of Addison was 
at once the most polite, and the most mirthful, that 
could be imagined; — that it was Terence and 
Catullus in one, heightened by an exquisite some- 
thing which was neither Terence nor Catullus, but 
Addison alone. Young, an excellent judge of seri- 
ous conversation, said, that when Addison was at 
his ease, he went on in a noble strain of thought and 
language, so as to chain the attention of every 
hearer. Nor were his great colloquial powers more 
admirable than the courtesy and softness of heart 
which appeared in his conversation. At the same 
time, it would be too much to say that he was wholly 
devoid of the malice which is, perhaps, inseparable 
from a keen sense of the ludicrous. He had one 
habit which both Swift and Stella applauded, and 
which we hardly know how to blame. If his first 
attempts to set a blundering dunce right were ill 
received, he changed his tone, " assented with civil 
Jeer," and lured the flattered coxcomb deeper and 
deeper into absurdity. That such was his practice 



CHARACTER OP ADDISON. 12^ 

we should, we think, have guessed from his works. 
The Tatler's criticisms on Mr. Softly 's sonnet, and 
the Spectator's dialogue with the politician, who is 
80 zealous for the honor of Lady Q — p — t — s, are 
excellent specimens of this innocent mischief. 
»■ Such were Addison's talents for conversation. 
But his rare gifts were not exhibited to crowds or 
to strangers. As soon as he entered a large com- 
pany, as soon as he saw an unknown face, his lipa 
were sealed, and his manners became constrained. 
None who met him only in great assemblies, would 
have been able to believe that he was the same man 
Who had often kept a few friends listening and 
laughing round a table, from the time when the 
play ended, till the clock of St. Paul's in Covent- 
Garden struck four. Yet, even at such a table, he 
was not seen to the best advantage. To enjoy his 
conversation in the highest perfection, it was neces- 
sary to be alone with him, and to hear him, in hia 
own phrase, think aloud. " There is no such thing," 
he used to say, " as real conversation, but between 
two persons." 

This timidity, a timidity surely neither ungrace- 
ful nor unamiable, led Addison into the two most 
serious faults which can with justice be imputed to 
him. He found that wine broke the spell which 
lay on his fine intellect, and was therefore too easily 
seduced into convivial excess. Such excess was in 
that age regarded, even by grave men, as the most 
venial of all peccadilloes ; and was so far from be- 
ing a mark of ill-breeding that it was almost essen- 
tial to the character of a fine gentleman. But the- 
smallest speck is seen on a white ground; and 



126 macaulay's miscellanies. 

almost all the biographers of Addison have said 
something about this failing. Of any other states- 
man or writer of Queen Anne's reign, we should no 
more think of saying that he sometimes took too 
much wine, than that he wore a long wig and a 
6 word. 

To the excessive modesty of Addison's nature, 
we must ascribe another fault which generally 
arises from a very different cause. He became a 
little too fond of seeing himself surrounded by a 
small circle of admirers, to whom he was as a king 
or rather as a god. All these men were far inferior 
to him in ability, and some of them had very serious 
faults. Nor did those faults escape his observation; 
for, if ever there was an eye which saw through 
and through men, it was the eye of Addison. But 
with the keenest observation, and the finest sense 
of the ridiculous, he had a large charity. The feel 
ing with which he looked on most of his humble 
companions was one of benevolence) slightly tinc- 
tured with contempt. He was at perfect ease in 
their company ; he was grateful for their devoted 
attachment; and he loaded them with benefits. 
Their veneration for him appears to have exceeded 
that with which Johnson was regarded by Bos well, 
or Warburton by Hurd. It was not in the power 
of adulation to turn such a head, or deprave such a 
heart as Addison's. But it must in candor be ad- 
mitted, that he contracted some of the faults which 
can scarcely be avoided by any person who is so 
unfortunate as to be the oracle of a small literary 
coterie. 



ANECDOTES OP STEELE. 127 



ANECDOTES OF STEELE. 

Steele liad known Addison from childhood. They 
had been together at the Charter House and at Ox- 
ford ; but circumstances had then, for a time, sepa- 
rated them widely. Steele had left college without 
taking a degree, had been disinherited by a rich 
relation, had led a vagrant life, had served in the 
army, had tried to find the philosopher's stone, and 
had written a religious treatise and several come- 
dies. He was one of those people whom it is 
impossible either to hate or to respect. His temper 
was sweet, his affections warm, his spirits lively, his 
passions strong, and his principles weak. His life 
was spent in sinning and repenting ; in inculcating 
what was right, and doing what was wrong. In 
speculation, he was a man of piety and honor ; in 
practice, he was much of the rake and a little of the 
swindler. He was, however, so good-natured that 
it was not easy to be seriously angry with him, and 
that even rigid moralists felt more inclined to pity 
than to blame him, when he diced himself into a 
spunging-house, or drank himself into a fever. Ad- 
dison regarded Steele with kindness not unmingled 
with scorn — tried, with little success, to keep him 
out of scrapes, introducing him to the great, prd'- 
cured a good place for him, corrected his plays, 
and, though by no means rich, lent him large sums 
of money. One of these loans appears, from a let- 
ter dated in August 1708, to have amounted to a 
thousand pounds. These pecuniary transactions 
probably led to frequent bickerings. It is said that, 



128 macaulay's miscellanies* 

on one occasion, Steele's negligence, or dishonesty, 
provoked Addison to repay himself by the help of a 
bailiff. We cannot join with Miss Aikin in reject- 
ing this story. Johnson heard it from Savage, who 
heard it from Steele. Few private transactions 
which took place a hundred and twenty years ago, 
are proved by stronger evidence than this. But we 
can by no means agree with those who condemn 
Addison's severity. The most amiable of mankind 
may well be moved to indignation, when what he 
has earned hardly, and lent with great inconve- 
nience to himself, for the purpose of relieving a 
friend in distress, is squandered with insane profu- 
sion. We will illustrate our meaning by an exam- 
ple, which is not the less striking because it is taken 
from fiction. Dr. Harrison, in Fielding's "Amelia," 
is represented as the most benevolent of human 
beings ; yet he takes in execution, not only the 
goods, but the person of his friend Booth. Dr. 
Harrison resorts to this strong measure because he 
has been informed that Booth, while pleading 
poverty as an excuse for not paying just debts, has 
been buying fine jewellery, and setting up a coach. 
No person who is well acquainted with Steele's 
life and correspondence, can doubt that he behaved 
quite as ill to Addison as Booth was accused of be- 
having to Dr. Harrison. The real history, we have 
little douht, was something like this :— A letter 
comes to Addison, imploring help in pathetic terms, 
and promising reformation and speedy repayment. 
Poor Dick declares that he has not an inch of can- 
dle, or a bushel of coals, or credit with the butcher 
for a shoulder of mutton. Addison is moved. He 



Addison's humor. 129 

determines to deny himself some medals which are 
wanting to his series of the Twelve Caesars ; to put 
off buying the new edition of " Bayle's Dictionary;" 
and .to wear his old sword and buckles another 
year. In this way he manages to send a hundred 
pounds to his friend. The next day he calls on 
Steele, and finds scores of gentlemen and ladies as- 
sembled. The fiddles are playing. The table is 
groaning under Champagne, Burgundy, and pyra- 
mids of sweetmeats. Is it strange that a man whose 
kindness is thus abused, should send sheriff's officers 
to reclaim what is due to him ] 

ADDISON'S HUMOR. 

But what shall we say of Addison's humor, of his 
sense of the ludicrous, of his power of awakening 
that sense in others, and of drawing mirth from in- 
cidents which occur every day, and from little pecu- 
liarities of temper and manner, such as may be 
found in every man ] We feel the charm. We 
give ourselves up to it. But we strive in vain to 
analyze it. 

Perhaps the best way of describing Addison's 
peculiar pleasantry, is to compare it with the plea- 
santry of some other great satirist. The three most 
eminent masters of the art of ridicule, during the 
eighteenth century, were, we conceive, Addison, 
Swift, and Voltaire. Which of the three had the 
greatest power of moving laughter may be question- 
ed. But each of them, within his own domain, was 
supreme. Voltaire is the prince of buffoons. His 
merriment is without disguise or restraint. He 

F* 



130 macaulay's miscellanies. 

gambols ; he grins ; he shakes his sides ; he points 
the finger ; he turns up the nose ; he shoots out the 
tongue. The manner of Swift is the very opposite 
to this. He moves laughter, but never joins in it. 
He appears in his vv^orks such as he appeared in 
society. All the company are convulsed v^ith mer- 
riment while the dean, the author of all the mirth, 
preserves an invincible gravity, and even sourness 
of aspect ; and gives utterance to the most eccentric 
and ludicrous fancies, with the air of a man reading 
the commination-service. 

The manner of Addison is as remote from that 
<of Swift as from that of Voltaire. He neither 
laughs out like the French wdt, nor, like the Irish 
wit, throws a double portion of severity into his 
countenance while laughing inly ; but preserves a 
look peculiarly his own, a look of demure serenity, 
disturbed only by an arch sparkle of the eye, an 
almost im.perceptible elevation of the brow, an 
almost imperceptible curl of the lip. His tone is 
never that either of a Jack Pudding or of a cynic. 
It is that of a gentleman, in whom the quickest 
sense of the ridiculous is constantly tempered by 
good nature and good breeding. 

We own that the humor of Addison is, in our 
opinion, of a more delicious flavor than the humor 
of either Swift or Voltaire. Thus much, at least, is 
certain, that both Swift and Voltaire have been 
successfully mimicked, and that no man has yet 
been able to mimic Addison. The letter of the 
Abbe Coyer to Pansophe is Voltaire all over, and 
imposed, during a long time, on the Academicians 
of Paris. There are passages in Arbuthnot's satiri- 



Addison's humor. 131 

cal works which we, at least, cannot distinguish 
from Swift's best writing. But of the many emi- 
nent men who have made Addison their model, 
though several have copied his mere diction with 
happy effect, none has been able to catch the tone 
of his pleasantry. In the World, in the Connois- 
seur, in the Mirror, in the Lounger, there are 
numerous papers written in obvious imitation of his 
Tattlers and Spectators. Most of those papers 
have some meiit; many are very lively and amus- 
ing ; but there is not a single one which could be 
passed off as Adddison's on a critic of the smallest 
perspicacity. 

But that which chiefly distinguishes Addison from 
Swift, from Voltaire, from almost all the other great 
masters of ridicule, is the grace, the nobleness, the 
moral purity, which we find even in his merriment. 
Severity, gradually hardening and darkening into 
misanthropy, characteiizes the works of Swift. The 
nature of Voltaire was, indeed, not inhuman ; but 
he venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces 
of att nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither 
in the Great First Cause nor in the awful enigma 
of the grave, could he see any thing but subjects 
for drollery. The more solemn and august the 
theme, the more monkey-like was his grimacing 
and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the mirth of 
Mephistophiles ; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth 
of Puck. If, as Soame Jenyns oddly imagined, a 
portion of the nappiness of Seraphim and just men 
made perfect be derived from an exquisite percep- 
tion of the ludicrous, their mirth must surely be 
none other than the mirth of Addison ; — a mirth 



132 macaulay's miscellanies. 

consistent with tender compassion for all that is 
frail, and with profound reverence for all that is 
sublime. Nothing great, nothing amiable, no moral 
duty, no doctrine of natural or revealed religion, 
has ever been associated by Addison with any de- 
grading idea. His humanity is without a parallel 
in literary history. The highest proof of human 
virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing 
it. No kind of power is more formidable than the 
power of making men ridiculous ; and that power 
Addison possessed in a boundless measure. How 
grossly that power was abused by Swift and Vol- 
taire, is well known. But of Addison it may be 
confidently affirmed that he has blackened no man's 
character, nay, that it would be difficult, if not im- 
possible, to find in all the volumes which he has left 
us a single taunt which can be called ungenerous 
or unkind. Yet he had detractors, whose malignity 
might have seemed to justify as terrible a revenge 
as that which mefn, not superior to him in genius, 
wreaked on Bettesworth and on Franc de Pompig- 
nan. He was a poHtician ; he was the best writer 
of his party ; he lived in times of fierce excitement 
— in times when persons of high character and sta 
tion stooped to scurrility such as is now practised 
by the basest of mankind. Yet no provocation and 
no example could induce him to return railing for 
railing. 



Addison's "spectator." 133 



ADDISON'S "SPECTATOR." 

The plan of the Spectator must be allowed to be 
both original and eminently happy. Every valua- 
ble essay in the series may be read vdth pleasure 
separately ; yet the five or six hundred essays form 
a whole, and a whole which has the interest of a 
novel. It must be remembered, too, that at that 
time no novel, giving a lively and pov/erful picture 
of the common life and manners of England, had 
appeared. Richardson was working as a composi- 
tor. Fielding was robbing birds' nests. Smollett 
was not yet born. The narrative, therefore, which 
connects together the Spectator's essays, gave to our 
ancestors their first taste of an exquisite and untried 
pleasure. That narrative was indeed constructed 
with no art or labor. The events were such events 
as occur every day. Sir Roger comes up to town 
to see Eugenie, as the worthy baronet always calls 
Prince Eugene, goes with the Spectator on the 
water to Spring Gardens, walks among the tombs 
in the abbey, is frightened by the Mohawks, but 
conquers his apprehension so far as to go to the 
theatre, when the " Distressed Mother" is acted. 
The Spectatoi pays a visit in the summer to Cover- 
ley Hall, is charmed with the old house, the old 
butler, and the old chaplain, eats a jack caught by 
Will Wimble, rides to the assises, and hears a point 
of law discussed by Tom Touchy. At last a letter 
from the honest butler brings to the club the news 
that Sir Roger is dead. Will Honeycomb marries 
and reforms at sixty. The club breaks up ; and 



134 macaulay's miscellanies. 

the Spectator resigns his functions. Such events 
can hardly be said to form a plot ; yet they are re- 
lated with such truth, such grace, such wit, such 
humor, such pathos, such knowledge of the human 
heart, such knowledge of the ways of the world, 
that they charm us on the hundredth perusal. We 
have not the least doubt that, if Addison had written 
a novel, on an extensive plan, it would have been 
superior to any that we possess. As it is, he is en- 
titled to be considered, not only. as the greatest of 
the English essayists, but as the forerunner of the 
great English novelists. 

We say this of Addison alone ; for Addison is 
the Spectator. About three-sevenths of the work 
are his ; and it is no exaggeration to say, that his 
first essay is as good as the best essay of any of his 
coadjutors. His best essays approach n^ar to abso- 
lute perfection ; nor is their excellence more won- 
derful than their variety. His invention never 
seems to flag; nor is he ever under the necessity 
of repeating himself, or of wearing out a subject. 
There are no dregs in his wine. He regales us 
after the fashion of that prodigal nabob who held 
that there was only one good glass in a bottle. As 
soon as we have tasted the first sparkling foam of a 
jest, it is withdrawn, and a fresh draught of nectar 
is at our lips. On the Monday we have an allegory 
as lively and ingenious as Lucien's Auction of 
Lives ; on the Tuesday an eastern apologue as 
richly colored as the Tales of Sherezade ; on the 
Wednesday, a character described with the skill of 
La Bruyere ; on the Thursday, a scene from com- 
mon life equal to the best chapter in the Vicar of 



Addison's "spectator.'* 135 

"Wakefield ; on the Friday, some sly Horatian 
pleasantry in the fashionable follies — on hoops, 
patches, or puppet-shows ; and on the Saturday a 
religious meditation which will bear a comparison 
with the finest passages in Massillon. 

It is dangerous to select where there is so much 
that deserves the highest praise. We will venture, 
however, to say, that any persons who wish to form 
a just notion of the extent and variety of Addison's 
powers, will do well to read at one sitting the fol- 
lowing papers ; — the two Visits to the Abbey, the 
Visit to the Exchange, the Journal of the Retired 
Citizen, the Vision of Mirza, the Transmigrations 
of Pug the Monkey, and the Death of Sir Roger 
de Coverley.* 

The least valuable of Addison's contributions to 
the Spectator are, in the judgment of our age, his 
critical papers. Yet his critical papers are always 
luminous, and often ingenious. The very worst of 
them must be regarded as creditable to him, when 
the character of the school in which he had been 
trained is fairly considered. The best of them 
were much too good for his readers. In truth, he 
was not so far behind our generation as he was be- 
fore his own. No essays in the Spectator were 
more censured and derided than those in which he 
raised his voice against the contempt with which 
our fine old ballads were regarded ; and showed 
the scoffers that the same gold which, burnished 
and polished, gives lustre to the ^neid and the 

• Nos. 26, 329, 69, 317, 153, 343, 517. These papers are all 
m the first seven volumes. The eighth must be considered as a 
separate work. 



136 macaulay's miscellanies. 

Odes of Horace, is mingled with the rude dross of 
Chevy Chace. 

ADDISON AND SWIFT 

At Dublin Swift resided, and there was much 
speculation about the way in which the dean and 
the secretary would behave toward each other. 
The relations which existed between these remarlc- 
able men form an interesting and pleasing portion 
of literary history. They had early attached them- 
selves to the same political party and to the same 
patrons. While Anne's whig ministry was in 
power, the visits of Swift to London and the official 
residence of Addison in Ireland had given them 
opportunities of knowing each other. They were 
the two shrewdest observers of their age. But 
their observations on each other had led them to" 
favorable conclusions. Swift did full justice to the 
rare powers of conversation which were latent 
under the bashful deportment of Addison. Addi- 
son, on the other hand, discerned much good nature 
under the severe look and manner of Swift ; and, 
indeed, the Swift of 1708 and the Swift of 1738 
were two very different men. 

But the paths of the two friends diverged widely. 
The whig statesmen loaded Addison with solid 
benefits. They praised Swift, asked him to dinner, 
and did nothing more for him. His profession laid 
them under a difficulty. In the state they could not 
promote him ; and they had reason to fear that, by 
bestowing preferment in the church on the author 
of the Tale of a Tub, they might give scandal to 



ADDISON AND SWIFT. 137 

the public, ■which had no high opinion of their ortho- 
doxy. He did not make fair allowance for the 
difficulties which prevented Halifax and Somers 
from serving him ; thought himself an ill-used man ; 
sacrificed honor and consistency to revenge ; joined 
the tones, and became their most formidable cham- 
pion. He soon found, however, that his old friends 
were less to blame than he had supposed. The 
dishke with which the queen and the heads of the 
church regarded him was insurmountable ; and it 
was with the greatest difficulty that he obtained an 
ecclesiastical dignity of no great value, on condition 
of fixing his residence in a country which he 
detested. 

Difference of political opinion had produced, not 
indeed a quan-el, but a coolness between Swift and 
Addison. They at length ceased altogether to see 
each other. Yet there was between them a tacit 
compact like that between the hereditary guests in 
the Iliad. 

It is not strange that Addison, who calumniated 
and insulted nobody, should not have calumniated 
or insulted Swift. But it is remarkable that Swift, 
to whom neither genius nor virtue was sacred, and 
who generally seemed to find, like most other rene- 
gades, a peculiar pleasure in attacking old friends, 
should have shown so much respect and terderaess 
to Addison. 

Fortune had now changed. The accession of the 
house of Hanover had secured in England the liber- 
ties of the people, and in Ireland the dominion of 
the Protestant caste. To that caste Swift was more 
odious than any other man. He was hooted and 



1^ macaulay's miscellanies. 

even pelted in the streets of Dublin ; and could not 
venture to ride along the strand for his health with- 
out the attendance of armed servants. Many whom 
he had formerly served now libelled and insulted 
him. At this time Addison arrived. He had been 
advised not to show the smallest civility to the dean 
of St. Patrick's. But he answered with admirable 
spirit, that it might be necessary for men whose 
fidelity to their party was suspected to hold no in- 
tercourse with political opponents ; but that one 
who had been a steady whig in the worst times 
might venture, when the good cause was triumphant, 
to shake hands with an old friend who was one of 
the vanquished tories. His kindness was soothing 
to the proud and cruelly wounded spirit of Swift ; 
and the two great satirists resumed their habits of 
friendly intercourse. 

Those associates of Addison, whose political 
opinions agreed with his, shared his good fortune. 
He took Tickell with him to Ireland. He procured 
for Budgell a lucrative place in the same kingdom. 
Ambrose Phillipps was provided for in England. 
Steele had injured himself so much by his eccentri- 
city and perverseness, that he obtained but a very 
small part of what he thought his due. He was, 
however, knighted. He had a place in the house- 
hold ; and he subsequently received other marks of 
favor from the court. 



ONE PHASE OP THE CHARACTER OP POPE. 139 



ONE PHASE OF THE CHARACTER OF POPE.* 

"' His own life was one series of tricks, as mean 
and as malicious as that of which he suspected 
Addison and Tickell. He was all stiletto and 
mask. To injure, to insult, to save himself from 
the consequence of injury and insult by lying and 
equivocating, was the habit of his life. He publish- 
ed a lampoon on the Duke of Chandos ; he was 
taxed with it ; and he lied and equivocated. He 
published a lampoon on Aaron Hill ; he was taxed 
with it; and he lied and equivocated. He pub- 
lished a still fouler lampoon on Lady Mary Wortley 
Montagu ; he was taxed with it ; and he lied with 
m*ore than usual effrontery and vehemence. He 
puffed himself and abused his enemies under feign- 
ed names. He robbed himself of his own letters, 
and then raised the hue and cry after them. Be- 
sides his frauds of malignity, of fear, of interest, 
and of vanity, there were frauds which he seems to 
have committed from love of fraud alone. He had 
a habit of stratagem — a pleasure in outwitting all 
who came near him. Whatever his object might 
be, the indirect road to it was that which he prefer- 
red. For Bolingbroke, Pope undoubtedly felt as 
much love and veneration as it was in his nature to 
feel for any human being. Yet Pope was scarcely 
dead when it was discovered that, from no motive 
except the mere love of artifice, he had been guilty 
of an act of gross perfidy to Bolingbroke. 

• Alexander Pope the Poet, 



140 macaulay's miscellanies. 



CHARACTER OF BARERE. 

We are not conscious that, when we opened this 
book, we were under the influence of any feeling 
likely to pervert our judgment. Undoubtedly we 
had long entertained a most unfavorable opinion of 
Barere ; but to this opinion we were not tied by 
any passion or by any interest. Our dislike was a 
reasonable dislike, and might have been removed 
by reason. Indeed, our expectation was, that these 
Memoirs would in some measure clear Barere's 
fame. That he could vindicate himself from all the 
charges which had been brought against him, we 
knew to be impossible ; and his editors admit that 
he has not done so. But we thought it highly pro- 
bable that some grave accusations would be refuted, 
and that many offences to which he would have 
been forced to plead guilty would be greatly ex- 
tenuated. We were not disposed to be severe. 
We were fully aware that temptations such as those 
to which the members of the Convention and of the 
committee of public safety were exposed, must try 
severely the strength of the firmest virtue. Indeed, 
our inclination has always been to regard with an 
indulgence, which to some rigid moralists appears 
excessive, those faults into which gentle and noble 
spirits are sometimes hurried by the excitement of 
conflict, by the maddening influence of sympathy, 
and by ill-regulated zeal for a public cause. 

With such feelings we read this book, and com- 
pared it with other accounts of the events in which 
Barere bore a part. It is now our duty to express 
the opinion to which this investigation has led uS; 



CHARACTER OP BARERE. 141 

Our opinion then is this, that Barere approached 
nearer than any person mentioned in history or fic- 
tion, whether man or devil, to the idea of consum- 
mate and universal depravity. In him the quahties 
which are the proper objects of hatred, and the 
qualities which are the proper objects of contempt, 
preserve an exquisite and absolute harmony. In 
almost every particular sort of wickedness he has 
had rivals. His sensuality was immoderate; but 
this was a failing common to him with many great 
and amiable men. There have been many men as 
covi^ardly as he, some as cruel, a few as mean, a few 
as impudent. There may also have been as great 
liars, though we never met with them or read of 
them. But when we put every thing together, 
sensuality, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery, men- 
dacity, barbarity, the result is something which in a 
novel we should condemn as caricature, and to 
which, we venture to say, no parallel can be found 
in history. 

It would be grossly unjust, we acknowledge, to 
try a man situated as Barere was by a severe 
standard. Nor have we done so. We have formed 
our opinion of him by comparing him, not with poli- 
ticians of stainless character, not with Chancellor 
D'Aguesseau, or General Washington, or Mr. Wil- 
berforce, or Earl Grey, but with his own colleagues 
of the mountain. That party included a considera- 
«ble number of the worst men that ever lived; but 
we see in it nothing like Barere. Compared with 
him, Fouche seems honest ; Billaud seems humane ; 
Hebert seems to rise into dignity. Every other 
chief of a party, says M. Hippolyte Carnot, has 



142 macaulay's miscellanies. 

found apologists : one set of men exalts the Giron- 
dists ; another set justifies Danton ; a third deifies 
Robespierre : but Barere has remained without a' 
defender. We venture to suggest a very simple 
solution of this phenomenon. All the other chiefs 
of parties had some good qualities, and Barere had 
none. The genius, courage, patriotism, and human- 
ity of the Girondist statesmen, more than atoned for 
what was culpable in their conduct, and should have 
protected them from the insult of being compared 
with such a thing as Barere. Danton and Robe- 
spierre were, indeed, bad men ; but in both of them 
some important parts of the mind remained sound. 
Danton was brave and resolute, fond of pleasure, 
of power, and of distinction, with vehement passions, 
with lax principles, but with some kind and manly 
feelings, capable of great crimes, but capable also 
of friendship and of compassion. He, therefore, 
naturally finds admirers among persons of bold 
and sanguine dispositions. Robespierre was a vain, 
envious, and suspicious man, with a hard heart,* 
weak nerves, and a gloomy temper. But we can- 
not with truth deny that he was, in the vulgar sense 
of the word, disinterested ; that his private life was 
correct, or that he was sincerely zealous for his own 
system of politics and morals. He, therefore, natu- 
rally finds admirers among honest but moody and 
bitter democrats. If no class has taken the reputa- 
tion of Barere under its patronage, the reason is 
plain : Barere had not a single virtue, nor even the 
eemblance of one. 



FALL OF THE GIRONDISTS. 143 



FALL OF THE GIRONDISTS. 

The following day was the saddest in the sad his- 
tory of the Revolution. The sufferers were so in- 
nocent, so brave, so eloquent, so accomplished, so 
young. Some of them were graceful and handsome 
youths of six or seven and twenty. Vergniaud and 
Gensonne were little more than thirty. They had 
been only a few months engaged in public affairs. 
In a few months the fame of their genius had filled 
Europe ; and they were to die for no crime but 
this, that they had wished to combine order, justice 
and mercy with freedom. Their great fault was 
want of courage. We mean want of political cour- 
age — of that courage which is proof to clamor and 
obloquy, and which meets great emergencies by 
daring and decisive measures. Alas ! they had but 
too good an opportunity of proving, that they did 
not want courage to endure with manly cheerful- 
ness the worst that could be inflicted by such tyrants 
as St. Just, and such slaves as Barere. 

They were not the only victims of the noble 
cause. Madame Roland followed them to the scaf- 
fold with a spirit as heroic as their own. Her hus- 
band was in a safe hiding-place, but could not bear 
to survive her. His body was found on the high 
road, near Rouen. He had fallen on his sword. 
Condorcet swallowed opium. At Bordeaux, the 
steel fell on the necks of the bold and quick-witted 
Gaudet, and of Barbaroux, the chief of those enthu- 
siasts from the Rhone whose valor, in the great 
crisis of the tenth of August, had turned back the 



144 macaulay's miscellanies. 

tide of battle from the Louvre to the Tuilerles. In 
a field near the Garonne was found all that the 
wolves had left of Petion, once honored, greatly in- 
deed beyond his deserts, as the model of republican 
virtue. We are far from regarding even the best 
of the Girondists with unmixed admiration ; but 
history owes to them this honorable testimony, that, 
being free to choose whether they would be op- 
pressors or victims, they deliberately and firmly 
resolved rather to suffer injustice than to inflict it. 

CHARACTER OF THE TERRORISTS. 

The popular notion is, we believe, that the lead- 
ing Terrorists were wicked men, but, at the same 
time, great men. "We can see nothing great about 
them but their wickedness. That their policy was 
daringly original is a vulgar error. Their policy is 
as old as the oldest accounts which we have of hu- 
man T- isgovernment. It seemed new in France, 
and in the eighteenth century, only because it had 
been long disused, for excellent reasons, by the en- 
lightened part of mankind. But it has always 
prevailed, and still prevails, in savage and half 
savage nations, and is the chief cause which pre- 
vents such nations from making advances towards 
civilisation. Thousands of deys, of beys, of pachas, 
of rajahs, of nabobs, have shown themselves as great 
masters of statecraft as the members of the commit- 
tee of public safety. Djezzar, we imagine, was 
superior to any of them in their own line. In fact, 
there is not a petty tyrant in Asia or Africa so dull 
or so unlearned as not to be fully qualified for the 



CHARACTER OP THE TERRORISTS. 145 

business of Jacobin police and Jacobin finance. To 
behead people by scores without caring whether 
they are guilty or innocent ; to wring money out of 
the rich by the help of jailers and executioners ; to 
rob the public creditor, and put him to death if he 
remonstrates ; to take loaves by force oat of the 
bakers' shops; to clothe and mount soldiers by 
seizing on one man's wool and linen, and on another 
man's horses and saddles, without eompensation, is 
of all modes of governing the simplest and most 
obvious. Of its morality v/e at present say nothing. 
But surely it requires no capacity beyond that of a 
barbarian or a child. By means like those which 
we have described, the committee of public safety 
undoubtedly succeeded, for a short time, in en- 
forcing profound submission, and in raising immense 
funds. But to enforce submission by butchery, and 
to raise funds by spoliation, is not statesmanship. 
The real statesman is he who, in troubled times, 
keeps down the turbulent without unnecessarily 
harassing the well-affected ; and who, when great 
pecuniary resources are needed, provides for the 
public exigencies without violating the security of 
property, and drying up the sources of future pros- 
perity. Such a statesman, we are confident, might, 
in 1793, have preserved the independence of France 
without shedding a drop of innocent blood, without 
plundering a single ware-house. Unhappily, the 
Republic was subject to men who were mere dema- 
gogues, and in ncT sense statesmen. They could 
declaim at a club. They could lead a rabble to 
mischief But they had no skill to conduct the 
affairs of an empire. The want of skill they sup- 
o 



146 macaulay's miscellanies. 

plied for a time by atrocity and blind violence. 
For legislative ability, fiscal ability, military ability, 
diplomatic ability, they had one substitute, the 
guillotine. Indeed their exceeding ignorance, and 
the barrenness of their invention, are the best ex- 
cuse for their murders and robberies. We really 
believe that they vv^ould not have cut so many 
throats, and picked so many pockets, if they had 
knoAvn how to govern in any other way. 

FAREWELL TO BARERK 

As far as we can judge from the few facts which 
remain to be mentioned, Barere continued Barere 
to the last. After his exile he turned Jacobin 
again, and, when he came back to France, joined 
the party of the extreme left in railing at Louis 
Philippe, and at all Louis Philippe's ministers. M. 
Casimir Perier, M. de Broglie, M. Guizot, and M. 
Thiers, in particular, are honored with his abuse ; 
and the king himself is held up to execration as a 
hypociitical tyrant. Nevertheless, Barere had no 
scruple about accepting a charitable donation of a 
thousand francs a-year from the privy purse of the 
sovereign whom he hated and reviled. This pen- 
sion, together with some small sums occasionally 
doled out to him by the department of the Interior, 
on the ground that he was a distressed man of let- 
ters, and by the department of Justice, on the 
ground that he had formerly held a high judicial 
office, saved him from the necessity of begging his 
bread. Having survived all his colleagues of the 
renowned committee of public safety, and almost 



FAREWELL TO BARERE. 147 

all his colleagues of the Convention, he died in Jan- 
uary, 1841. He had attained his eighty-sixth year. 
We have now laid before our readers what we 
believe to be a just account of this man's life. Can 
it be necessary for us to add any thing for the pur- 
pose of assisting their judgment of his character? 
If we were writing about any of his colleagues in 
the committee of public safety, about Carnot, Robes- 
pierre, or St. Just, nay, even about Couthon, Collot, 
or Billaud, we might feel it necessary to go into a 
full examination of the arguments which have been 
employed to vindicate or to excuse the system of 
Terror. We could, we think, show that France 
was saved from her foreign enemies, not by the sys- 
tem of Terror, but in spite of it ; and that the perils 
which were made the plea for the violent policy of 
the Mountain, were, to a great extent, created by 
that very policy. We could, we think, also show 
that the evils produced by the Jacobin administra- 
tion did not terminate when it fell; that it bequeath- 
ed a long series of calamities to France and to Eu- 
rope; that public opinion, which had during two 
generations been constantly becoming more and 
more favorable to civil and religious freedom, under- 
went, during the days of Terror, a change of which 
the traces are still to be distinctly perceived. It was 
natural that there should be such a change, when 
men saw that those who called themselves the cham- 
pions of popular rights had compressed into the 
space of twelve months more crimes than the kings 
of France, Merovingian, Carlovingian, and Capetian, 
had perpetrated in twelve centuries. Freedom was 
regarded as a gieat delusion. Men were willing to 



148 macaulay's miscellanies. 

Bubmit to the government of hereditary princes, of 
fortunate soldiers, of nobles, of priests ; to any gov- 
ernment but that of philosophers and philanthropists. 
Hence the imperial despotism, with its enslaved 
press and its silent tribune, its dungeons stronger 
than the old Bastile, and its tribunals more obsequi- 
ous than the old parliaments. Hence the restora- 
tion of the Bourbons and of the Jesuits, the Chamber 
of 1815, with its categories of proscription, the re- 
vival of the feudal spirit, the encroachments of the 
clergy, the persecution of the Protestants, the ap- 
pearance of a new breed of De Montforts and Do- 
minies in the full light of the nineteenth century. 
Hence the admission of France into the Holy Alli- 
ance, and the war waged by the old soldiers of the 
tri-color against the liberties of Spain. Hence, too, 
the apprehensions with which, even at the present 
day, the most temperate plans for widening the nar- 
row basis of the French representation are regard- 
ed by those who are especially interested in the se- 
curity of property and the maintenance of order. 
Half a century has not sufficed to obliterate the stain 
which one year of depravity and madness has left on 
the noblest of causes. 

Nothing is more ridiculous than the manner in 
which writers like M. Hippolyte Carnote defend or 
excuse the Jacobin administration, while they de- 
claim against the reaction which followed. That the 
reaction has produced and is still producing much 
evil, is perfectly true. But what produced the re- 
action 1 The spring flies up with a force propor- 
tioned to that with which it has been pressed down. 
The pendulum which is drawn far in one direction 



FAREWELL TO BARERE. 149 

swings as far in the other. The joyous madness of 
intoxication in the evening is followed by languor 
and nausea on the morrow. And so, in politics, it 
is the sure law that every excess shall generate its 
opposite ; nor does he deserve the name of a states- 
man who strikes a great blow without fully calcula- 
ting the effect of the rebound. But such calculation 
was infinitely beyond the reach of the authors of the 
Reign of Terror. Violence, and more violence, 
blood, and more blood, made up their whole policy. 
In a few months these poor creatures succeeded in 
bringing about a reacti(3n, of which none of them 
saw, and of which none of us may see, the close ; 
and, having brought it about, they marvelled at it ; 
they bewailed it ; they execratea it ; they ascribed 
it to every thing but the real cause — their own im- 
morality and their own profound incapacity for the 
conduct of great affairs. 

These, however, are considerations to which, on 
the present occasion, it is hardly necessary for us to 
advert ; for, the defence which has been set up for 
the Jacobin policy good or bad, it is a defence which 
cannot avail Barere. From his own life, from his 
own pen, from his own mouth, we can prove that 
the part which he took in the work of blood is to be 
attributed, not even to sincere fanaticism, not even 
to misdirected and ill-regulated patriotism, but either 
to cowardice, or to delight in human misery. Will 
it be pretended that it was from public spirit that he 
murdered the Girondists ] In these very Memriirs 
he .tells us that he always regarded their death as 
the greatest calamity that could befall France. Will 
it be pretended that it was from public spirit that 



150 MACAULAY^S MISCELLANIES. 

he raved for the head of the Austrian woman 1 In 
these very Memoirs he tells us that the time spent 
in attacking her was ill-spent, and ought to have 
been employed in concerting measures of national 
defence. Will it be pretended that he was induced 
by sincere and earnest abhorrence of kingly govern- 
ment to butcher the living and to outrage the dead ; he 
who invited Napoleon to take the title of King of 
Kings, he who assures us, that after the Restoration 
he expressed in noble language his attachment to 
monarchy, and to the house of Bourbon 1 Had he 
been less mean, something might have been said in 
extenuation of his cruelty. Had he been less cruel, 
something might have been said in extenuation of 
his meanness. Biit for him, regicide and court-spy, 
for him who patronized Lebon and betrayed De- 
merville, for him who wantoned alternately in gas- 
conades of Jacobinism, and gasconades of servility, 
what excuse has the largest charity to offer 1 

We cannot conclude without saying something 
about two parts of his character, which his biogra- 
pher appears to consider as deserving of high admi- 
ration. Barere, it is admitted, was somewhat fickle | 
but in two things he was consistent, in his love of 
Christianity, and in his hatred to England. If this 
were so, we must say that England is much more 
beholden to him than Christianity. 

It is possible that our inclinations may bias our 
judgment; but we think that we do not flatter our- 
selves when we say, that Barere's aversion to our 
country was a sentiment as deep and constant as his 
mind was capable of entertaining. The value of 
this complimeilt is, indeed, somewhat diminished by 



FAREWELL TO BARERE. 151 

the circumstance, that he knew very little about us. 
His ignorance of our institutions, manners, and his- 
tory, is the less excusable, because, according to his 
own account, he consorted much, during the peace 
of Amiens, with Englishmen of hote, such as that 
eminent nobleman Lord Greaten, and that not less 
eminent philosopher, Mr. Mackensie Coefhis. In 
spite, however, of his connection with these well- 
known ornaments of our country, he was so ill-in- 
formed about us as to fancy that our government 
was always laying plans to torment him. If he was 
hooted at Saintes, probably by peoj^le whose rela- 
tions he had murdered, it was because the cabinet 
of St. James' had hired the mob. If nobody would 
read his bad books, it was because the cabinet of St. 
James', had secured the reviewers. His accounts 
of Mr. Fox, of Mr. Pitt, of the Duke of Wellington, 
of Mr. Canning, swarm with blunders, surpassing 
even the ordinary blunders committed by French- 
men who write about England. Mr. Fox and Mr. 
Pitt, he tells us, were ministers in two different 
reiofns. Mr. Pitt's sinkinsr fund was instituted in 
order to enable England to pay subsidies to the 
powers allied against the French Republic. The 
Duke of Welhngton's house in Hyde Park was 
built by the nation, which twice voted the sum of 
06200,000 for the purpose. This, however, is exclu- 
sive of the cost of the frescoes, which were also paid 
for out of the public purse. Mr. Canning was the 
first Englishman whose death Europe had reason to 
lament ; for the death of Lord Ward, a relation, we 
presume, of Lord Greaten and Mr. Ccef his, had been 
an immense benefit to mankind. 



V 

152 macaulay's miscellanies. 

Ignorant, however, as Barere was, he knew enough 
of us to hate us ; and we persuade ourselves that, 
had he known us better, he would have hated us 
more. The nation which has combined, beyond all 
example and all hope, the blessings of liberty with 
those of order, might well be an object of aversion 
to one who had been false alike to the cause of or- 
der and to the cause of liberty. We have had 
among us intemperate zeal for popular rights ; we 
have had among us also the intemperance of loy- 
alty. But we have never been shocked by such a 
spectacle as the Barere of 1794, or as the Barere of 
1804. Compared with him, our fiercest demagogues 
have been gentle ; compared with him, our meanest 
courtiers have been manly. Mix together Thistle- 
wood and Bubb Dodington, and you are still far 
from having Barere. The antipathy between him 
and us is such, that neither for the crimes of his ear- 
lier, nor for those of his later life, does our language, 
rich as it is, furnish us with adequate names. We 
have found it difficult to relate his history without 
having perpetual recourse to the French vocabulary 
of horror, and to the French vocabulary of baseness. 
It is not easy to give a notion of his conduct in the 
Convention, without using those emphatic terms, guil- 
lotinade, noyade, fusillade, nitraillade. It is not easy 
to give a notion of his conduct under the consulate 
and the empire, without borrowing such words as 
mouchard and mouton. 

We, therefore, like his invectives against us much 
better than any thing else that he has written ; and 
dwell on them, not merely with complacency, but 
with a feeling akin to gratitude. It was but little 



FAREWELL TO BARERE. 153 

that he could do to promote the honor of our coun*. 
try ; but that httle he did strenuously and constant- 
ly. Renegade, traitor, slave, coward, liar, slander- 
er, murderer, hack writer, police-spy — the one small 
service which he could render to England, was to 
hate her ; and such as he was may all who hate 
her be ! 

We cannot say that we contemplate with equal 
satisfaction that fervent and constant zeal for reli- 
gion, which, according to M. Hippolyte Carnot, dis- 
tinguished Barere ; for, as we think that whatever 
brings dishonor on religion is a serious evil, we had, 
we own, indulged a hope that Barere was an atheist. 
We now learn, however, that he was at no time 
even a sceptic, that he adhered to his faith through 
the whole Revolution, and that he has left several 
manuscript works on divinity. One of these is a 
pious treatise, entitled, " Of Chiistianity and of its 
Influence." Another consists of meditations on the 
Psalms, which will doubtless greatly console and 
edify the church. 

This makes the character complete. AVhatsoever 
things are false, whatsoever things are dishonest, 
whatsoever things are unjust, whatsoever things are 
impure, whatsoever things are hateful, whatsoever 
things are of evil report, if there be any vice, and if 
there be any infamy, all these things, we knew, 
were blended in Barere. But one thing was still 
wanting, and that M. Hippolyte Carnot has supj^lied. 
When to such an assemblage of qualities a high 
profession of piety is added, the effect becomes over- 
powering. We sink under the contemplation of 
such exquisite and manifold perfection; and feel 
r.* 



154 macaulay's miscellanies. 

with deep humility, how presumptuous it was in us 
to think of composing the legend of this beatified 
athlete of the faith, Saint Bertrand of the Carmag- 
noles. 

Something more we had to say about him. But 
let him go. We did not seek him out, and will not 
keep him longer. If those who call themselves his 
friends had not forced him on our notice, we should 
never have vouchsafed to him more than a passing 
word of scorn and abhoiTence, such as we might 
fling at his brethren, Hebert and Fouquier Tinvii'le, 
and Carrier and Lebon. We have no pleasure in 
seeing human nature thus degraded. We turn with 
disgust from the filthy and spiteful Yahoos of the 
fiction ; and the filthiest and most spiteful Yahoo of 
the fiction was a noble creature when compared 
with the Barere of history. But what is no pleasure, 
M. Hippolyte Carnot has made a duty. It is no 
light thing, that a man in high and honorable pub- 
lic trust, a man who, from his connections and posi- 
tion, may not unnaturally be supposed to speak 
the sentiments of a large class of his countrymen 
should come forward to demand approbation for 
a life, black with every sort ot wickedness, and un- 
redeemed by a single virtue. This M. Hippolyte 
Carnot has done. By attempting to enshrine this 
Jacobin carrion, he has forced us to gibbet it ; and 
we venture to say that, from the eminence of in- 
famy on which we have placed it, he will not easily 
take it down. 



JEREMY BENTHAM. 155 



JEREMY BENTHAM. 

Of Mr. Bentham we would at all times speak with 
the reverence which is due to a great original think- 
er, and to a sincere and ardent friend of the human 
race. If a few weaknesses were mingled with his 
eminent virtues, if a few errors insinuated themselves 
among the many valuable truths which he taught, 
this is assuredly no time for noticing those weak- 
nesses or those errors in an unkind or sarcastic, spi- 
rit. A great man has gone from among us, full of 
years, of good works, and of deserved honors. In 
some of the highest departments in which the hu- 
man intellect can exert itself, he has not left his 
equal or his second behind him. From his contem- 
poraries he has had, according to the usual lot, more 
or less than justice. He has had blind flatterers 
and blind detractors ; — flatterers who could see no- 
thing but perfection in his style, detractors who could 
see nothing but nonsense in his matter. He will 
now have judges. Posterity will pronounce its calm 
and impartial decision ; and that decision will, we 
firmly believe, place in the same rank with Galileo, 
and with Locke, the man who found jurisprudence 
a gibberish, and left it a science. Never was there 
a literary partnership so fortunate as that of Mr. 
Bentham and M. Dumont. The raw material which 
Mr. Bentham furnished was most precious : but it 
was unmarketable. He was, assuredly, at once a 
great logician and a great rhetorician. But the ef- 
fect of his logic was injured by a vicious arrange- 
ment, and the effect of his rhetoric by a vicious style. 



156 macaulay's miscellanies. 

His mind was vigorous, comprehensive, subtile, fer- 
tile of arguments, fertile of illustrations. But he 
spoke in an unknown tongue ; and, that the congre- 
gation might be edified, it was necessary that some 
brother having the gift of interpretation, should ex- 
pound the invaluable jargon. His oracles were of 
high import ; but they were traced on leaves and 
flung loose to the wind. So negligent was he of the 
arts of selection, distribution, and compression, that 
to persons who formed their judgment of him from 
his works in their undigested state, he seemed to be 
the least systematic of all philosophers. The truth 
is, that his opinions formed a system, which, whether 
sound or unsound, is more exact, more entire, and 
more consistent with itself than any other. Yet to 
superficial readers of his works in their original form, 
and indeed to all readers of those works who did not 
bring great industry and great acutenesa to the stu- 
dy, he seemed to be a man of a quick and ingeni- 
ous but ill-regulated mind, who saw truth only by 
glimpses, who threw out many striking hints, but 
who had never thought of combining his doctrines 
in one harmonious whole. 

M. Dumont was admirably qualified to supply 
what was wanting in Mr. Bentham. In the qualities 
in which the French writers surpass those of all 
other nations — neatness, clearness, precision, con- 
densation — he surpassed all French writers. If M. 
Dumont had never been born, Mr. Bentham would 
still have been a very great man. But he would 
have been great to himself alone. The fertility of 
his mind would have resembled the fertility of those 
vast American wildernesses, in which blossoms and 



JEREMY BENTHAM. 157 

decays a rich but unprofitable vegetation, "wherewith 
the reaper filleth not his hand, neither he that bindeth 
up the sheaves his bosom." It would have been with 
his discoveries as it has been with the ** Century of 
Inventions." His speculations on laws would have 
been of no more practical use than Lord Worces- 
ter's speculations on steam-engines. Some genera- 
tions hence, perhaps, when legislation has found its 
Watt, an antiquarian might have published to the 
world a curious fact, that in the reign of George the 
Third, there had been a man called Bentham, who 
had given hints of many discoveries made since his 
time, and who had really, for his age, taken a most 
philosophical viev/ of the principles of jurisprudence. 
Many persons have attempted to interpret be- 
tween this powerful mind and the public. But, in 
our opinion, M. Dumont alone has succeeded. It is 
remarkable that, in foreign countries, where Mr. 
Bentham's works are known solely through the me- 
dium of the French version, his merit is almost uni- 
versally acknowledged. Even those who are most 
decidedly opposed to his political opinions, the very 
chiefs of the Holy Alliance, have publicly testified 
their respect for him. In England, on the contrary, 
many persons who certainly entertained no preju- 
dice against him on political grounds, were long in 
the habit of mentioning him contemptuously. In- 
deed, what was said of Bacon's philosophy, may be 
said of Bentham's. It was in little repute among 
us, till judgments in its favor came from beyond 
sea, and convinced us, to our shame, that we had 
been abusing and laughing at one of the gi'eatest 
men of the age. 



158 macaulay's miscellanies, 

THE FRENCH LEGISLATURE DURING THE 
REVOLUTION. 

It is clear, that among the French of that day, 
political knowledge was absolutely in its infancy. 
It would indeed have been strange if it had attained 
maturity in the time of censors, of lettres-de-cachet, 
and of beds of justice. The electors did not know 
how to elect. The representatives did not know 
how to deliberate. M. Dumont taught the constitu- 
ent body of Montreuil how to perform their func- 
tions, and found them apt to learn. He afterward 
tried, in concert with Mirabeau, to instruct the Na- 
tional Assembly in that admirable system of Parlia- 
mentary tactics, which has been long established in 
the English House of Commons, and which has made 
the House of Commons, in spite of all the defects in 
its composition, the best and fairest debating society 
in the world. But these accomplished legislators, 
though quite as ignorant as the mob of Montreuil, 
proved much less docile, and cried out that they did 
not want to go to school to the English. Their de- 
bates consisted of endless successions of trashy pam- 
phlets, all beginning with something about the ori- 
ginal compact of society, man in the hunting state, 
and other such foolery. They sometimes diversified 
and enlivened these long readings by a little rioting. 
They bawled ; they hooted ; they shook their fists. 
They kept no order among themselves. They were 
insulted with impunity by the crowd which filled 
their galleries. They gave long and solemn consid- 
eration to trifles. They hurried through the most 



FRENCH LEGflSLATURE THE REVOLUTION. 159 

important resolutions with fearful expedition. They 
wasted months in quibbling about the words of that 
false and childish Declaration of Rights on which 
they professed to found their new constitution, and 
which was at irreconcilable variance with every 
clause of that constitution. They annihilated in a 
single night privileges, many of which partook of 
the nature of property, and ought therefore to have 
been most delicately handled. 

They are called the Constituent Assembly. Never 
was a name less appropriate. They were not con- 
stituent, but the very reverse of constituent. They 
constituted nothing that stood, or that deserved to 
last. They had not, and they could not possibly 
have, the information or the habits of mind which 
are necessary for the framing of that most exquisite 
of all machines, a government. The metaphysical 
cant with which they prefaced their constitution, has 
long been the scoff of all parties. Their constitution 
itself, that constitution which they described as ab- 
solutely perfect, and to which they predicted im- 
mortality, disappeared in a few months, and left no 
trace behind it. They were great only in the work 
of destruction. 

The glory of the National Assembly is this, that 
they were in truth, what Mr. Burke called them in 
austere irony, the ablest architects of ruin that ever 
the world saw. They were utterly incompetent to 
perform any work which required a discriminating 
eye and a skilful hand. But the work which was 
then to be done was a work of devastation. They had 
to deal with abuses so horrible and so deeply rooted, 
that the highest political wisdom could scarcely have 



160 

produced greater good to mankind than was pro- 
duced by their fierce and senseless temerity. De- 
molition is undoubtedly a vulgar task ; the highest 
glory of the statesman is to construct. But there is 
a time for everything, a time to set up, and a time 
to pull down. The talents of revolutionary leaders, 
and those of the legislator, have equally their use 
and their season. It is the natural, the almost uni- 
versal law, that the age of insurrections and pro- 
scriptions shall precede the age of good government, 
of temperate liberty, and liberal order. 

The French Revolution was the most horrible 
event recorded in history, all madness' and wicked- 
ness, absurdity in theory, and atrocity in practice. 
What folly and injustice in the revolutionary laws ! 
What grotesque affectation in the revolutionary 
ceremonies ! What fanaticism ! What licentious- 
ness ! What cruelty ! Anacharsis Clootz and Ma- 
rat, feasts of the Supreme Being, and marriages of 
the Loire, trees of liberty, and heads dancing on 
pikes — the whole forms a kind of infernal farce, 
made up of everything ridiculous, and everything 
frightful. This it is to give freedom to those who 
have neither wisdom nor virtue. It is not only by 
bad men interested in the defence of abuses, that 
arguments like these have been urged against all 
schemes of political improvement. Some of the 
highest and purest of human beings conceived such 
scorn and aversion for the follies and crimes of the 
French Revolution, that they recanted, in the mo- 
ment of triumph, those liberal opinions to which they 
had clung in defiance of persecution. 



LOUIS THE FOURTEENtH. 161 



LOUIS THE FOURTEENTH. 

Concerning Louis the Fourteenth himself, the 
world seems at last to have formed a correct judg- 
ment. He was not a great general ; he was not a great 
statesman ; but he was in one sense of the words, a 
great king. Never was there so consummate a mas- 
ter of what our James the First would have called 
kingcraft — of all those arts which most advantage- 
ously display the merits of a prince, and most com- 
pletely hide his defects. Though his internal ad- 
ministration was bad, though the military triumphs 
which gave splendor to the early part of his reign 
were not achieved by himself, though his later years 
were crowded with defeats and humiliations, though 
he was so ignorant that he scarcely understood the 
Latin of his massbook, though he fell undei the 
control of a cunning Jesuit and of a more cunning 
old woman, he succeeded in passing himself off on 
his people as a being above humanity. And this is 
the more extraordinary, because he did not seclude 
himself from the public gaze like those Oriental 
despots whose faces are never seen, and whose very 
names it is a crime to pronounce lightly. It has been 
eaid that no man is a hero to his valet ; and all the 
world saw as much of Louis the Fourteenth, as his 
valet could see. Five hundred people assembled to 
see him shave and put on his breeches in the morn- 
ing. He then kneeled down at the side of his bed, 
and said his prayer, while the whole assembly await-, 
ed the end in solemn silence, the ecclesiastics on 
their knees, an4 the laymen vvdth their hats before 



162 Macaulay's miscellanies. 

their faces. He walked about his gardens with a 
train of two hundred courtiers at his heels. All 
Versailles came to see him dine and sup. He was 
put to bed at night in the midst of a crowd as great 
as that which had met to see him rise in the morn- 
ing. He took his very emetics in state, and vomited 
majestically in the presence of all the grandes and 
petites entrees. Yet though he constantly exposed 
himself to the public gaze in situations in which it 
is scarcely possible for any man to preserve much 
personal dignity, he to the last impressed those who 
surrounded him with the deepest awe and reverence. 
The illusion which he produced on his worshippers, 
can be compared only to those illusions to which 
lovers are proverbially subject during the season of 
courtship. Jt was an illusion which affected even 
the senses. The contemporaries of Louis thought 
him tall. Voltaire, who might have seen him, and 
who had lived with some of the most distinguished 
members of his court, speaks repeatedly of his ma- 
jestic stature. Yet it is as certain as any fact can 
be, that he was rather below than above the middle 
size. He had, it seems, a way of holding himself, 
a way of walking, a way of swelling his chest and 
rearing his head, which deceived the eyes of the mul- 
titude. Eighty years after his death, the royal cem- 
etery was violated by the revolutionists ; his coffin 
was opened ; his body was dragged out ; and it ap- 
peared that the prince, whose majestic figure ha4 
been so long and loudly extolled, was in truth a lit- 
tle man.* That fine expression of Juvenal is sin* 

* Even M. de Chateaubriand, to whom, we should have 
thought, all the Bourbons would have seemed at least six feel 



CHAftACTER OP HORAdE WALfOLE. 163 

gularly applicable, both in its literal and in its meta- 
phorical sense, to Louis the Fourteenth : 

" Mors sola fatetur 
Quantula sint hominum corpuscula." 

His person and his government have had the same 
fate. He had the art of making both appear grand 
and august, in spite of the clearest evidence that 
both were below the ordinary standard. Death and 
time have exposed both the deceptions. The body 
of the great king has been measured more justly 
than it was measured by the courtiers who were 
afraid to look above his shoetye. His public charT 
acter has been scrutinised by men free from the 
hopes and fears of Boileau and Moliere. In the 
grave, the most majestic of princes is only five feet 
eight. In history, the hero and the politician dwin- 
dles into a vain and feeble tyrant, the slave of priests 
and women, little in war, little in government, little 
in everything but the art of simulating greatness. 

CHARACTER OF HORACE WALPOLE. 

He was, unless we have formed a very erroneous 
judgment of his character, the most eccentric, the 
most artificial, the most fastidious, the most capri- 
cious, of men. His mind was a bundle of inconsis- 
tent whims and affectations. His features were 

high, admits this fact. " C'est une erreur," says he in his strange 
memoirs of the Duke of Berri, "de croire que Louis XIV. etoit 
d'une haute stature. Une cuirasse qui nous reste de lui, et leg 
exhumations de St. Denys, n'ont laisse sur ce point aucun 
doute." 



164 macaulay's miscellanies. 

covered by mask within mask. When the oiitei 
disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you 
were still as far as ever from seeing the real man. 
He played innumerable parts, and overacted them 
all. When he talked of misanthropy, he out-Timon- 
ed Timon. When he talked philanthropy, he left 
Howard at an immeasurable distance. He scoffed 
at Courts, and kept a chronicle of their most trifling 
scandal ; at Society, and was blown about by its 
slightest veerings of opinion ; at Literary fame, and 
left fair copies of his private letters, with copious 
notes, to be published after his decease 5 at Rank, 
and never for a moment forgot that he was an Hon- 
orable ; at the practice of Entail, and tasked the 
ingenuity of conveyancers to tie up his villa in the 
strictest settlement. 

The conformation of his mind was such, thai 
whatever was little, seemed to him great, and what- 
ever was great, seemed to him little. Serious busi- 
ness was a trifle to him, and trifles were his serious 
business. To chat with blue stockings ; to write 
little copies of complimentary verses on little occa- 
sions ; to superintend a private press ; to preserve 
from natural decay the perishable topics of Rane- 
lagh and White's ; to record divorces and bets, 
Miss Chudleigh's absurdities, and George Selwyn's 
good sayings ; to decorate a grotesque house with 
pie-crust battlements ; to procure rare engravings 
and antique chimney-boards ; to match odd gaunt- 
lets ; to lay out a maze of walks within five acres of 
ground — these were the grave employments of his 
long life. From these he turned to politics as to an 
amusement. After the labors of the print-shop and 



CHARACTER OF HORACE WALPOLE. 165 

the auction-room, he unbent his mind in the House of 
Commons. And, having indulged in the recreation 
of making laws and voting millions, he returned to 
more important pursuits — to researches after Queen 
Mary's comb, Wolsey's red hat, the pipe which Van 
Tromp smoked during his last seafight, and the spur 
which King William struck into the flank of Sorrel, 

In everything in which he busied himself — in the 
fine arts, in literature, in public affairs — he was 
drawn by some strange attraction from the great to 
the little, and from the useful to the odd. The po- 
litics in which he took the keenest interest, were 
politics scarcely deserving of the name. The growl- 
ings of George the Second, the flirtations of Princess 
Emily with the Duke of Grafton, the amours of 
Prince Frederic with Lady Middlesex, the squab- 
bles between Gold Stick and the Master of the 
Buck-hounds, the disagreements between the tutors 
of Prince George — these matters engaged almost 
all the attention which Walpole could spare from 
matters more important still; — from bidding for 
Zinckes and Pettitots, from cheapening fragments of 
tapestry, and handles of old lances, from joining bits 
of painted glass, and from setting up memorials of 
departed cats and dogs. While he was fetching and 
carrying the gossip of Kensington Palace and Carl- 
ton House, he fancied that he was engaged in poli- 
tics, and when he recorded that gossip, he fancied 
that he was writing history. 

He was, as he has himself told us, fond of faction 
as an amusement. He loved mischief: but he loved 
quiet ; and he was constantly on the watch for op- 
portunities of gratifying both his tastes at once. He 



166 macaulay's miscellanies. 

sometimes contrived without showing himself, to dis- 
turb the course of ministerial negotiations, and to 
spread confusion through the political circles. He 
does not himself pretend that, on these occasions, 
he was actuated by public spirit ; nor does he ap- 
pear to have had any private advantage in view. 
He thought it a good practical joke to set public 
men together by the ears ; and he enjoyed their 
perplexities, their accusations, and their recrimina- 
tions, as a malicious boy enjoys the embarrassment 
of a misdirected traveller. 

About politics, in the high sense of the word, he 
knew nothing, and cared nothing. He called him- 
self a Whig. His father's son could scarcely assume 
afiy other name. It pleased him also to affect a fool- 
ish aversion to kings as kings, and a foolish love and 
admiration of rebels as rebels : an(i perhaps, while 
kings were not in danger, and while rebels were 
not in being, he really believed that he held the doc- 
trines which he professed. To go no farther than 
the letters now before us, he is perpetually boasting 
to his friend Mann of his aversion to royalty and to 
royal persons. He calls the crime of Damien " that 
least bad of murders, the murder of a king." He 
hung up in his villa a fac-simile of the death-warrant 
of Charles, with the inscription " Major Charta,^* 
Yet the most superficial knowledge of history might 
have taught him that the Restoration, and the crimes 
and follies of the twenty-eight years which followed 
the Restoration, were the effects of this " Greater 
Charter." 

He had, it is plain, an uneasy consciousness of the 
frivolity of his favorite pursuits ; and this conscious- 



CHARACTER OP HORACE WALPOLE. 167 

ness produced one of the most diverting of his ten 
thousand affectations. His busy idleness, his indif- 
ference to matters which the world generally regards 
as important, his passion for trifles, he thought fit 
to dignify with the name of philosophy. He spoke 
of himself as of a man whose equanimity was proof 
to ambitious hopes and fears, who had learned to ' 
rate power, wealth, and fame, at their true value, 
and whom the conflict of parties, the rise and fall of 
statesmen, the ebbs and flows of public opinion, 
moved only to a smile of mingled compassion and 
disdain. It was owing to the peculiar elevation of 
his character, that he cared about a lath and plaster 
pinnacle more than about the Middlesex election, and 
about a miniature of Grammont, more than about 
the American Revolution. Pitt and Murray might 
talk themselves hoarse about trifles. But questions 
of government and war were too insignificant to de- 
tain a mind which was occupied in recording the 
scandal of club-rooms and the whispers of the back- 
stairs, and which was even capable of selecting and 
disposing chairs of ebony and shields of rhinoceros- 
skin. 

One of his innumerable whims was an extreme 
dislike to be considered as a man of letters. Not 
that he was indifferent to literary fame. Far from 
it. Scarcely any writer has ever troubled himself 
so much about the appearance which his works were 
to make before posterity. But he had set his heart 
on incompatible objects. He washed to be a celebra- 
ted author, and yet to be a mere idle gentleman — one 
of those epicurean gods of the earth who do nothing 
at all, and who pass their existence in the contem- 



"168 macaulay's miscellanies. 

plation of their own perfections. He did not like to 
have anything in common with the wretches who 
lodged in the little courts behind St. Martin's Church, 
and stole out on Sundays to dine with their booksel- 
ler. He avoided the society of authors. He spoke 
with lordly contempt of the most distinguished 
among them. He tried to find out some way of 
writing books, as M. Jourdain's father sold cloth, 
without derogating from his character of Gentilliomme. 
His judgment of literature, of contemporary lite- 
rature, especially, was altogether perverted by his 
aristocratical feelings. No writer surely was ever 
guilty of so much false and absurd criticism. He al- 
most invariably speaks with contempt of those books 
which are now universally allowed to be the best 
that appeared in his time ; and, on the other hand, 
he speaks of writers of rank and fashion as if they 
were entitled to the same precedence in literature, 
which would have been allowed to them in a draw- 
ing-room. In these letters, for example, he says, 
that he would rather have written the most absurd 
lines in Lee than Thomson's " Seasons." The pe- 
riodical paper called " The World," on the other 
hand, was by "our first writers." Who, then, were 
the first writers of England in the year 1753 1 Wal- 
pole has told us in a note. Our readers will proba- 
bly guess that Hume, Fielding, Smollett, Richafd- 
8on, Johnson, Warburton, Collins, Akenside, Gray, 
Dyer, Young, Warton, Mason, or some of those dis- 
tinguished men, were on the list. Not one of them. 
Our first writers, it seems, were Lord Chesterfield, 
Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whitehead, Sir Charles WilHams, 
Mr. Soame Jenyns, Mr. Cambridge, Mr. Coventry, 



CHARACTER OF HORACE WALPOLE. 169 

Of these seven gentlemen, Whitehead was the low- 
est in station, but was the most accomplished tuft- 
hunter of his time. Coventry was of a noble family. 
The other five had among them two peerages, two 
seats in the House of Commons, three seats in the 
Privy Council, a baronetcy, a blue riband, a red ri- 
band, about a hundred thousand pounds a year, and'''^' 
not ten pages that are worth reading. The writings 
of Whitehead, Cambridge, Coventry, and Lord 
Bath, are forgotten. Soame Jenyns is remembered 
chiefly by Johnson's review of the foolish Essay on 
the Origin of Evil. Lord Chesterfield stands much 
lower in the estimation of posterity, than he would 
have done if his letters had never been published. 
The lampoons of Sir Chailes Williams are now read 
only by the curious ; and though not without occa- 
sional flashes of wit, have always seemed to us, we 
must own, -very poor performances. 

Walpole had neither hopes nor fears. Though 
the most Frenchified English writer of the eight- 
eenth century, he troubled himself little about the 
portents which were daily to be discerned in the 
French literature of his time. While the most 
eminent Frenchmen were studying with enthusias- 
tic delight English politics and English philosophy, 
he was studying as intently the gossip of the old 
court of France. The fashions and scandal of Ver- 
sailles and Marli, fashions and scandal a hundred 
years old, occupied him infinitely more than a great 
moral revolution which was taking place in his sight. 
He took a prodigious interest in every noble sharper, 
whose vast volume of wig, and infinite length of ri- 
band, had figured at the dressing or at the tucking 

H 



17d MAC AUL ay's miscellanies. 

up of Louis tbe Fourteenth, and of every profligate 
woman of quality, who had carried her train of 
lovers backward and forward from King to Par- 
liament, and from Parliament to King, during the 
wars of the Fronde. These were the people of 
whom he treasured up the smallest memorial, of 
whom he loved to hear the most trifling anecdote, 
and for whose likenesses he would have given 
any price. Of the great French writers of his own 
time, Montesquieu is the only one of whom he 
speaks with enthusiasm. And" even of Montesquieu 
he speaks with less enthusiasm than of that abject 
thing, Crebillon, the younger, a scribbler as licen- 
tious as Louvet, and as dull as Rapin. A man must 
be strangely constituted who can take interest in 
pedantic journals of the blockades laid by the Duke 
of A. to the hearts of the Marquise de B. and the 
Comtesse de C This trash Walpole extols in 
language sufiiciently high for the merits of " Don 
Quixote." He wished to possess a likeness of 
Crebillon, and Liotard, the first painter of minia- 
tures then living, was employed to preserve the 
features of the profligate twaddler. The admirer 
of the Sopha, and of the Lettres Atheniennes, had 
little respect to spare for the men who were then 
at the head of" French literature. He kept care- 
fully out of their way. He tiied to keep other 
people from paying them any attention. He could 
not deny that Voltaire and Rousseau were clever 
men ; but he took every opportunity of depreciat- 
ing them. Of D'Alembert he spoke with a con- 
tempt, which, when the intellectual powers of the 
two men are compared, seems exquisitely ridicu 



CHARACTER OF HORACE WALPOLE. 171 

lous. D'Alembert complained that he was accused 
of having written Walpole's squib against Rous- 
seau. " I hope," says Walpole, " that nobodj'- will 
attribute D'Alembert's works to me." He was in 
little danger. 

It is impossible to deny, however, that Walpole's 
works have real merit, and merit of a very rare, 
though not of a very high kind. Sir Joshua Rey- 
nolds used to say, that though nobody would for a 
moment compare Claude to Raphael, there would 
be another Raphael before there was another 
Claude. And we own that we expect to see fresh 
Humes and fresh Burkes, before we again fall in 
with that peculiar combination of moral and intel- 
lectual qualities, to which the writings of Walpole 
owe their extraordinary popularity. 

It is easy to describe him by negatives. He 
had not a creative imagination. He had not a 
pure taste. He was not a great reasoner. There 
is indeed scarcely any writer, in whose works 
it would be possible to find so many contradic- 
tory judgments, so many sentences of extrava- 
gant nonsense. Nor was it only in his familiar 
correspondence that he wrote in this flighty and 
inconsistent manner ; but in long and elaborate 
books, in books repeatedly transcribed and intend- 
ed for the public eye. We will give an instance or 
two ; for, without instances, readers not very fami- 
liar with his works, will scarcely understand our 
meaning. In the ** Anecdotes of Painting," he 
states, very truly, that the art declined after the 
commencement of the civil wars. He proceeds to 
Itiquire why this happened. The explanation, we 



172 macaulay's miscellanies. 

should have thought, would have been easily found. 
The loss of the raiost munificent and judicious pa- 
tron that the fine arts ever had in England — for 
such undoubtedly was Charles — the troubled state 
of the country, the distressed condition of many of 
the aristocracy, perhaps also the austerity of the 
victorious party— these circumstances, we conceive, 
fully account for the phenomenon. But this solu- 
tion was not odd enough to satisfy Walpole. He 
discovers another cause for the decline of the art, 
the want of models. Nothing worth painting, it 
seems, was left to paint. " How picturesque," he 
exclaims, " was the figure of an Anabaptist 1" As 
if puritanism had put out the sun and withered the 
trees ; as if the civil wars had blotted out the ex- 
pression of character and passion from the human 
lip and brow; as if many of the men whom Van- 
dyke painted, had not been living in the time of 
the Commonwealth, with faces little the worse for 
wear; as if many of the beauties afterward por- 
trayed by Lely were not in their prime before the 
Restoration ; as if the costume or the features of 
Cromwell and Milton were less picturesque than 
those of the round-faced peers, as like each other 
as eggs to eggs, who look out from the middle of 
the periwigs of Kneller. In the "Memoirs," again, 
Walpole sneers at the Prince of Wales, afterward 
George the Third, for presenting a collection of 
books tx) one of the American colleges during the 
Seven Years' War, and says that, instead of books, 
His E,oyal Highness ought to have sent arms and 
ammunition ; as if a war ought to suspend all study 
and all education; or as if it were the business 



iHANCIS BACON. 173 

of the Prince of Wales to supply the colonies with 
military stores out of his own pocket. We have 
perhaps dwelt too long on these passages, but we 
have done so because they are specimens of Wal- 
pole's manner. Everybody who reads his worka 
with attention, will find that they swarm with loose 
and foolish observations like those which we have 
cited ; observations which might pass in conversa- 
tion or in a hasty letter, but which are unpardon 
able in books deliberately w^ritten and repeatedly 
corrected. 

FRANCIS BACON. 

It is by the "Essays" that Bacon is best known to 
the multitude. The JVovum Organnm and the De 
Augmentis are much talked of, but little read. They 
have produced indeed a vast effect on the opinions 
of mankind ; but they have produced it through the 
operations of intermediate agents. They have 
moved the intellects which have moved the world. 
It is in the ** Essays" alone that the mind of Bacon 
is brought into immediate contact with the minds of 
ordinary readers. There, he opens an exoteric 
school, and he talks to plain men in language which 
everybody understands, about things in which every- 
body is interested. He has thus enabled those who 
must otherwise have taken his merits on trust to 
judge for themselves ; and the great body of readers 
have, during several generati(*is, acknowledged that 
the man who has treated with such consummate 
ability questions with which they are familiar, may 
well be supposed to deserve all the praise bestowed 
on him by those who have sat in his inner school. 



174 maoaulay's miscellanies. 

Without any disparagement to the admirable trea* 
tise De Jlugmentis, we must say that, in our judg- 
ment, Bacon's greatest performance is the first book 
of the JVovum Organum. All the peculiarities of his 
extraordinary mind are found there in the highest 
perfection. Many of the aphorisms, but particular- 
ly those in which he gives examples of the influence 
of the idola, show a nicety of observation that has 
never been surpassed. Every part of the book 
blazes with wit, but with wit which is employed 
only to illustrate and decorate truth. No book ever 
made so great a revolution in the mode of thinking, 
overthrew so many prejudices, introduced so many 
new opinions. Yet no book was ever written in a 
less contentious spirit. It truly conquers with chalk 
and not with steel. Proposition after proposition 
enters into the mind, is received not as an invader, 
but as a welcome friend, and though previously un- 
known, becomes at once domesticated. But what 
we most admire is the vast capacity of that intellect 
which, without effort, takes in at once all the do- 
mains of science — ^all the past, the present, and the 
future, all the errors of two thousand years, all the 
encouraging signs of the passing times, all the 
bright hopes of the coming age. Cowley, who was 
among the most ardent, and not among the least 
discerning followers of the new philosophy, has, in 
one of his finest poems, compared Bacon to Moses 
standing on Mount Pisgah. It is to Bacon, we 
think, as he appears in the first book of the JS^ovum 
Organum, that the comparison appHes with peculiar 
felicity. There we see the great Lawgiver looking 
around from his lonely elevation on an infinite ex- 



FRANCIS BACON. 175 

panse ; beliind him a wilderness of dreary sands and 
bitter waters in which successive generations have 
sojourned, always moving, yet never advancing, 
reaping no harvest and building no abiding city ; 
before him a goodly land, a land of promise, a land 
flowing with milk and honey. While the multitude 
below saw only the flat sterile desert in which they 
had so long wandered, bounded on every side by a 
near horizon, or diversified only by some deceitful 
mirage, he was gazing from a far higher stand, on 
a far lovelier country — following with his eye the 
long course of fertilising rivers, through ample pas- 
tures, and under the bridges of great capitals — mea- 
suring the distances of marts and havens, and por- 
tioning out all those wealthy regions from Dan to 
Beersheba. 

It is painful to turn back from contemplating 
Bacon's philosophy to contemplate his life. Yet 
without so turning back it is impossible fairly to es- 
timate his powers. He left the University at an ear- 
lier age than that at which most people repair thith- 
er. While yet a boy he was plunged into the midst 
of diplomatic business. Thence he passed to the 
study of a vast technical system of law, and worked 
his way up through a succession of laboTious offices 
to the highest post in his profession. In the mean 
time he took an active part in every Parliament ; he 
was an adviser of the Crown ; he paid court with 
the greatest assiduity and address to all whose fa- 
vor was likely be of use to him ; he lived much in 
society ; he noted the slightest peculiarities of char- 
acter and the slightest changes of fashion. Scarce- 



176 macaulay's miscellanies. 

ly any man has led a more stirring life than that 
which Bacon led from sixteen to sixty. Scarcely 
any man has been better entitled to be called a tho- 
rough man of the world. The founding of a new 
philosophy, the imparting of a new direction to the 
minds of speculators — this was the amusement of 
his leisure, the work of hours occasionally stolen from 
the Woolsack and the Council Board. This consid- 
eration while it increases the admiration with which 
we regarded his intellect, increases also our regret 
that such an intellect should so often have been un- 
worthily employed. He well knew the better course, 
and had, at one time, resolved to pursue it. " I con- 
fess," said he in a letter written when he was still 
young, " that I have as vast contemplative ends as I 
have moderate civil ends." Had his civil ends con- 
tinued to be moderate, he would have been, not only 
the Moses, but the Joshua of philosophy. He would 
have fulfilled a large part of his own magnificent 
predictions. He would have led his followers, not 
only to the verge, but into the heart of the promised 
land. He would not merely have pointed out, but 
would have divided the spoil. Above all, he would 
have left not only a great, but a spotless name. 
Mankind would then have been able to esteem their 
illustrious benefactor. We should not then be com- 
pelled to regard his character with mingled contempt 
and admiration, with mingled aversion and gratitude. 
We should not then regret that there should be so 
many proofs of the narrowness and selfishness of 
a heart, the benevolence of which was yet large 
enough to take in all races and all ages. We should 
not then have to blush for the disingenuousness of 



I 

WILLIAM GONGREYE, THE DRAMATIST. 177 

the most devoted worshipper of speculative truth^ for 
the serviHty of the boldest champion of intellectual 
freedom. We should not then have seen the same 
man at one time far in the van, and at another time 
far in the rear of his generation. We should not 
then be forced to own, that he who first treated 
legislation as a science was among the last English- 
men who used the rack ; that he wht) first summon- 
ed philosophers to the great work of interpreting 
nature was among the last Englishmen who sold 
justice. And we should conclude our suiTey of a 
life placidly, honorably, beneficently passed, " in in- 
dustiious observations, grounded conclusions, and 
profitable inventions and discoveries,"* with feelings 
very different from those with which we now turn 
away from the checkered spectacle of so much glo- 
ry and so much shame. 

WILLIAM CONGREVE, THE DRAMATIST. 

William Congreve was born in 1670,t at Bardsey, 
in the neighborhood of Leeds., His father, a young- 
er son of a very ancient Staffordshire family, had dis- 
tinguished himself among the cavaliers in the civil 
war, was set down after the Restoration for the Or- 
der of the Royal Oak, and subsequently settled in 
Ireland, under the patronage of the Earl of Bur- 
lington. 

Congreve passed his childhood and youth in Ire- 
land. He was sent to school at Kilkenny, and 

*From a letter to Bacon from Lord Burleigh. 

t Mr. Leigh Hunt says 1669. But the Old Style has misled 
him. 

H* 



178 macaulay's miscellanies. 

tbence went to the University of Dublin. His learn 
ing does great honor to hjs instructors. From his 
writings it appears, not only that he was well ac- 
quainted with Latin literature, but that his know- 
ledge of the Greek poets was such as was not, in 
his time, common even in a college. 

When he had completed his academical studies, 
he was sent to London to study the law, and was 
entered of the Middle Temple. He troubled him- 
self, however, very little about pleading or convey- 
ancing; and gave himself up to literature and society. 
Two kinds of ambition early took possession of his 
mind, and often pulled it in opposite directions. He 
was conscious of great fertility of thought, and pow- 
er of ingenious combination. His lively conversation, 
his polished manners, and his highly respectable 
connections, had obtained for him ready access to 
the best company. He longed to be a gi-eat writer. 
He longed to be a man of fashion. Either object 
was within his reach. But could he secure both 1 
Was there not something vulgar in letters — some- 
thing inconsistent with the easy apathetic graces of 
a man of the mode 1 Was it aristocratical to be 
confounded with creatures who lived in the cocklofts 
of Grub Sti'eet, to bargain with publishers, to hurry 
printers' devils, to squabble with managers, to be 
applauded or hissed by pit, boxes, and galleries ? 
Could he forego the renown of being the first wit of 
his age ^ Could he attain that renown without sul- 
lying what he valued quite as much — his character 
for gentility 1 The history of his life is the history 
of a conflict between these two impulses. In his 
youth the desire of literary fame had the mastery ; 



WILLUM eONOREVE, THE DRAMATIST. 179 

but soon the meaner ambition overpowered the 
higher, and obtained supreme dominion over his 
mind. 

His first work, a novel of no great value, he 
published under the assumed name of " Cleophil." 
His second was the " Old Bachelor," acted in 1693, 
a play inferior indeed to his other comedies, but, 
in its own line, inferior to them alone. The plot is 
equally destitute of interest and of probability. The 
characters are either not distinguishable, or are dis- 
tinguished only by peculiarities of the most glaring 
kind. But the dialogue is resplendent with wit and 
eloquence — which indeed are so abundant that the 
fools come in for an ample share — and yet preserves 
a certain colloquial air, a certain indescribable ease, 
of which Wycherly had given no example, and which 
Sheridan in vain attempted to imitate. The author, 
divided between pride and shame — pride at having 
written a good play, and shame at having done an un- 
gentlemanlike thing — pretended that he had merely 
scribbled a few scenes for his own amusement, and 
affected to yield unwillingly to the importunities of 
those who pressed him to try his fortune on the 
stage. The "Old Bachelor" was seen in manuscript 
by Dryden ; one of whose best qualities was a hearty 
and generous admiration for the talents of others. 
He declared that he had never seen such a first 
play ; and lent his services to bring it into a form 
lit for representation. Nothing was wanting to the 
success of the piece. It was so cast as to bring into 
play all the comic talent, and to exhibit on the 
boards in one view all the beauty which Drury Lane 
Theatre, then the only theatre in London, could aa- 



180 macaulay's miscellanies. 

semble. The result was a complete triumph; and 
the author was gratified with rewards more sub- 
stantial than the applauses of the pit. Montagu, 
then a lord of the treasury, immediately gave him a 
place, and, in a short time, added the reversion of 
another place of much greater value, which, how- 
ever, did not become vacant till many years had 
elapsed. 

In 1794, Congreve brought out the ** Double- 
Dealer," a comedy in which all the powers which 
had produced the " Old Bachelor" show themselves, 
matured by time and improved by exercise. But 
the audience was shocked by the characters of 
Maskwell and Lady Touchwood. And, indeed, 
thete is something strangely revolting in the way in 
which a group that seems to belong to the house of 
Laius or of Pelops, is introduced into the midst of 
the Brisks, Froths, Carelesses, and Plyants. The 
play was unfavorably received. Yet, if the praise 
of distinguished men could compensate an author 
for the disapprobation of the multitude, Congreve 
bad no reason to repine. Dryden, in one of the 
most ingenious, magnificent, and pathetic pieces 
that he ever wrote, extolled the author of the ''Dou- 
ble-Dealer" in terms which now appear extravagant- 
ly hyperbolical. Till Congreve came forth- — so ran 
this exquisite flattery — the superiority of the poets 
who preceded the civil wars was acknowledged. 

" Theirs was the giant race before the flood." 

Since the return of the Royal house, much art and 
ability had been exerted, but the old masters had 
been still unrivalled. 



WILLIAM CONGREVE, THE DRAMATIST. 181 

" Our builders were with want of genius curst. 
The second temple was not like the first." 

At length a writer had arisen who, just emerging 
from boyhood, had surpassed the authors of the 
" Knight of the Burning Pestle," and the ** Silent 
Woman," and who had only one rival left to con- 
tend with. 

"Heaven, that but once was prodigal before, 
To Shakspeave gave as much, he could not give him more." 

Some lines iiear the end of the poem are singularly 
graceful and touching, and sank deep into the heart 
of Congreve. 

" Already am I worn with cares and age. 
And just abandoning the ungrateful stage; 
But you, whom every Muse and Grace adorn, 
Whom I foresee to better fortune born, 
Be kind to my remains; and, oh, defend 
Against your judgment your departed friend, 
Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue. 
But guard those laurels which descend to you," 

The crowd, as usual, gradually came over to the 
opinion of the men of note ; and the ** Double- 
Dealer" was before long quite as much admired, 
though perhaps never so much liked as the " Old 
Bachelor." 

In 1695 appeared " Love for Love," superior both 
in wit and in scenic effect to either of the preceding 
plays. It was performed at a new theatre which 
Betterton and some other actors, disgusted by the 
treatment which they received in Drury Lane, just 
opened in a tennis-court near Lincoln's Inn. Scarce- 



•182 macaulay's miscellanies. 

ly any comedy within the memory of the oldest man 
had been equally successful. The actors were so 
elated that they gave Congreve a share in their the- 
atre, and he promised, in return, to furnish them 
with a play every year, if his health would permit. 
Two years passed, however, before he produced the 
" Mourning Bride ;" a play which, paltry as it is when 
compared, we do not say with Lear or Macbeth, but 
with the best dramas of Massinger and Ford, stands 
very high among the tragedies of the age in which 
it was written. To find anything so good we must 
go twelve years back to "Venice Preserved," or six 
years forwaixl to the " Fair Penitent." The noble 
passage which Johnson, in writing and in conversa- 
tion, extolled above any other in the English drama, 
has suffered greatly in the public estimation from 
the extravagance of his praise. Had he contented 
himself with saying that it was finer than anything 
in the tragedies of Dryden, Otway, Lee, Rowe, 
Southern, Hughes, and Addison — than anything, in 
short, that had been written for the stage since the 
time of Charles the First — he would not have been 
in the wrong. 

The success of the " Mourning Bride" was even 
greater than that of " Love for Love." Congreve 
was now allowed to be the first tragic, as well as the 
first comic dramatist of his time ; and all this at 
twenty-seven. We believe that no English writer 
except Lord Byron, has, at so early an age, stood 
BO high in the estimation of his contemporaries. 

At this time took place an event which deserves, 
in our opinion, a very different sort of notice from 
that which has been bestowed on it by Mr. Leigh 



CHARACTER OF THE BENGALEES. 183 

Hunt, The nation had now nearly recovered from 
the demoralising- effect of the Puritan austerity. 
The gloomy follies of the reign of the Saints were 
but faintly remembered. The evils produced by 
profaneness and debauchery were recent and glar- 
ing. The Court, since the Revolution, had ceased 
to patronise licentiousness. Mary was strictly pious ; 
and the vices of the cold, stern, and silent William, 
were not obtruded on the public eye. Discounten- 
anced by the government, and falling in the favor 
of the people, the profligacy of the Restoration still 
maintained its ground in some parts of society. Its 
strongholds were the places where men of wit and 
fashion congregated, and above all, the theatres. 
At this conjuncture arose a great reformer, whom, 
widely as we differ from him in many important 
points, we can never mention without respect. 

CHARACTER OF THE BENGALEES. 

The physical organisation of the Bengalee is fee- 
ble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant va- 
por bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs 
delicate, his movements languid. During many 
ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder 
and more hearty breeds. Courage, independence, 
veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and 
his situation are equally unfavorable. His mind 
bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak 
even to helplessness, for purposes of manly resist- 
ance ; but its suppleness and its tact move the chil- 
dren of sterner climates to admiration not unmin- 
gled with contempt. All those arts which are the 



184 macaulay's miscellanies. 

natural defence of the weak, are more familiar with 
this subtle race than to the Ionian of the times of 
Juvenal, or to the Jew of the dark ages. What the 
horns are to the buffalo, what the paw is to the ti- 
ger, what the sting is to the bee, what beauty, ac- 
cording to the old Greek song, is to woman, deceit 
is to the Bengalee. Large promises, smooth excuses, 
elaborate tissues of circumstantial falsehood, chica- 
nery, perjury, forgery, are the weapons, offensive and 
defensive, of the people of the Lower Ganges. All 
those millions do not furnish one sepoy to the armies 
of the Company. But as usurers, and money- 
changers, as sharp legal practitioners, no class of 
human beings can bear a comparison with them. 
With all his softness, the Bengalee is by no means 
placable in his enmities, or prone to pity. The per- 
tinacity with which he adheres to his purposes, yields 
only to the immediate pressure of fear. Nor does 
he lack a certain kind of courage which is often 
wanting in his masters. To inevitable evils he is 
sometimes found to oppose a passive fortitude, such 
as the Stoics attributed to their ideal sage. An Eu- 
ropean warrior who rushes on a battery of cannon 
with a loud hurrah, will shriek under the surgeon's 
knife, and fall into an agony of despair at the sen- 
tence of death. But the Bengalee would see his 
country overrun, his house laid in ashes, his children 
murdered or dishonored, without having the spirit 
to strike one blow; he has yet been known to ejidure 
torture with the firmness of Mucins, and to mount 
the scaffold with the steady step and even 23ulse of 
Algernon Sydney. 



SIR PHILIP iPRANCIfi. 186 



SIR PHILIP FRANCIS. (JUNIUS.) 

It is scarcely possible to mention this eminent 
man without adverting for a moment to the ques- 
tion which his name at once suggests to every mind. 
Was he the author of the Letters of Junius '? Our 
own firm belief is, that he was. The external evi- 
dence is, we think, such as would support a verdict 
in a civil, nay, in a criminal proceeding. The 
handwriting of ^Junius is the very peculiar hand- 
writing of Francis, slightly disguised. As to the 
position, pursuits and connections of Junius, the 
following are the most important facts which can 
be considered as clearly proved : first, that he was 
acquainted with the technical forms of the secretary 
of the state's oflftce ; secondly, that he was intimate- 
ly acquainted with the business of the war office ; 
thirdly, that he, during the year 1770, attended de- 
bates in the House of Lords, and took notes of 
speeches, particularly of the speeches of Lord 
Chatham ; fourthly, that he bitterly resented the 
appointment of Mr. Chamier to the place of depu- 
ty sectetary-at-war ; fifthly, that he was bound by 
some strong tie to the first Lord Holland. Now, 
Francis passed some years in the secretary of state's 
office ; he was subsequently chief clerk of the war- 
office. He repeatedly mentioned that he had him- 
self, in 1770, heard speeches of Lord Chatham ; and 
some of those speeches were actually printed from 
his notes. He resigned his clerkship at the war- 
office from resentment at the appointment of Mr. 
Chamier. It was by Lord Holland that he was first 



186 macaulay's miscellanies. 

introduced into the public service. Now here are 
five marks, ?ill of which ought to be found in Junius. 
They are all five found in Francis. We do not be- 
lieve that more than two of them can be found in 
any other person whatever. If this argument does 
not settle the question, there is an end of all reason- 
ing on circumstantial evidence. 

The internal evidence seems to us to point the 
same way. The styH of Francis bears a strong re- 
semblance to that of Junius ; nor are we disposed 
to admit, what is generally taken for granted, that 
the acknowledged compositions of Francis are very 
decidedly inferior to the anonymous letters. The 
argument from inferiority, at all events, is one which 
may be urged with at least equal force against every 
claimant that has ever been mentioned, with the sin- 
gle exception of Burke, who certainly was not Ju- 
nius. And what conclusion, after all, can be drawn 
from mere inferiority 1 Every writer must produce 
his best work ; and the interval between his best 
work and his second best work may be very wide 
indeed. Nobody will say that the best letters of 
Junius are more decidedly superior to the acknow- 
ledged works of Francis, than three or four of Cor- 
neille's tragedies to the rest ; than three or four of 
Ben Jonson's comedies to the rest ; than the Pil- 
grim's Progi-ess to the other works of Bunyan ; than 
Don Quixote to the other works of Cervantes. 
Nay, it is certain that the Man in the Mask, who- 
ever he may have been, was a most unequal writer. 
To go no further than the letters which bear the 
signature of Junius, — the letter to the king, and the 
letters to Home Tooke, have little in common, ex- 



SIR PHILIP FRANCIS. 187 

cept the asperity; and asperity was an ingredient 
eeldom wanting either in the writings or in the 
speeches of Francis. 

Indeed, one of tlie strongest reasons for believing 
that Francis was Junius, is the moral resemblance 
between the two men. It is not difficult, from the 
letters which, under various signatures, are known 
to have been written by Junius, and from his deal- 
ings with Woodfall and others, to form a tolerably 
correct notion of his character. He was clearly a 
man not destitute of real patriotism and magnanim- 
ity — a man whose vices were not of a sordid kind. 
But he must also have been a man in the highest 
degree arrogant and insolent, a man prone to male- 
volence, and prone to the error of mistaking his 
malevolence for public virtue. "Doest thou well to 
be angry 1" was the question asked in old time of 
the Hebrew prophet. And he answered, *' I do 
well." This was evidently the temper of Junius ; 
and to this cause we attribute the savage cruelty 
which disgraces several of his letters. No man is so 
merciless as he who, under a strong self-delusion, 
confounds his antipathies with his duties. It may 
be added, that Junius, though allied with the demo- 
cratic party by common enmities, was the very op- 
posite of a democratic politician. While attacking 
individuals with a ferocity which perpetually violated 
all the laws of literary warfare, he regarded the most 
defective parts of old institutions with a respect 
amounting to pedantry ; — pleaded the cause of Old 
Sarum with fervor, and contemptuously told the cap- 
italists of Manchester and Leeds, that, if they want- 
ed votes, they might buy land and become freehold- 



188 MACAULAY's MISCELLA^flES. 

ers of Lancashire and Yorkshire. All this, we be- 
lieve, might stand, with scarcely any change, for a 
character of Philip Francis. 

It is not strange that the great anonymous writer 
should have been willing at that time to leave the 
country which had been so powerfully stirred by 
his eloquence. Everything had gone against him. 
That party which he clearly preferred to every 
other, the party of George Grenville, had been 
scattered by the death of its chief; and Lord Suf- 
folk had led the greater part of it over to the 
ministerial benches. The ferment produced by tho 
Middlesex election had gone down. Every faction 
must have been alike an object of averson to Junius. 
His opinions on domestic affairs separated him from 
the ministry; his opinions on colonial affairs from 
the opposition. Under such circumstances, he had 
thrown down his pen in misanthropic despair. His 
farewell letter to Woodfall bears date the 19th of 
January, 1773. In that letter, he declared that he 
must be an idiot to write again ; that he had meant 
well by the cause and the public; that both were 
given up ; that there were not ten men who would 
act steadily on any question. " But it is all alike," 
he added, *' vile and contemptible. You have never 
flinched that I know of; and I shall always rejoice 
to hear of your prosperity." These were the last 
words of Junius. In a year from that time, Philip 
Francis was on his voyage to Bengal. 



HYDER ALL 189 



HYDER ALL 



About thirty years before tbis time, a Mabomme- 
dan soldier bad begun to distiiiguisb bimself in the 
wars of Southern India. His education bad been 
neglected; bis extraction was mean. His father had 
been a petty officer of revenue ; his grandfather a 
wandering Dervise. But though thus meanly de- 
scended — though ignorant even of the alphabet — the 
adventurer had no sooner been placed at the head 
of a body of troops, than he approved himself a man 
born for conquest and command. Among the crowd 
of chiefs who were struggling for a share of India, 
none could compare with him in the qualities of the 
captain and the statesman. He became a general — 
be became a prince. Out of the fragments of old 
principalities, which had gone to pieces in the gen- 
eral wreck, he formed for himself a great, compact, 
and vigorous empire. That empire he ruled with the 
ability, severity, and vigilance of Louis the Eleventh. 
Licentious in his pleasures, implacable in his re- 
venge, he bad yet enlargement of mind enough to 
perceive how much the prosperity of subjects adds 
to the strength of government. He was an oppres- 
sor; but he had at least the merit of protecting his 
people against all oppression except bis own. He 
was now in extreme old age ; but his intellect was 
as clear, and his spirit as high, as in the prime of 
manhood. Sucli was the great Hyder Ali, the found- 
er of the Mahommedan kingdom of Mysore, and the 
most formidable eriemy with whom the English con- 
querors of India ever had to contend. 



190 maca-ULAy's miscellanies. 

Had Hastings been governor of Madras, Hyder 
would have been either made a friend, or vigor- 
ously encountered as an enemy. Unhappily the 
English authorities in the south provoked their 
powerful neighbor's hostility, without being pre- 
pared to repel it. On a sudden, an army of ninety 
thousand men, far superior in discipline and effi- 
ciency to any other native force that could be found 
in India, came pouring through those wild passes, 
which, worn by mountain torrents, and dark with 
jungle, lead down from the table-land of Mysore to 
the plains of the Carnatic. This great army was 
accompanied by a hundred pieces of cannon; ^nd 
its movements were guided by many French officers, 
trained in the best military schools of Europe. 

Hyder was everywhere triumphant. The sepoj'^s 
in many British garrisons flung down their arms. 
Some forts were surrendered by t7-eachery, and some 
by despair. In a few days the whole open country 
north of the Coleroon had submitted. The English 
inhabitants of Madras could already see by night 
from the top of Mount St. Thomas, the eastern sky 
reddened by a vast semi-circle of blazing villages. 
The white villas, embosomed in little groves of tu- 
lip trees, to which our countrymen retire after the 
daily labors of government and of trade, when the 
cool evening breeze springs up from the bay, were 
now left without inhabitants ; for bands of the fierce 
horsemen of Mysore had already been seen prowl- 
ing near those gay verandas. Even the town was 
not thought secure, and the British merchants and 
public functionaries made haste to crowd themselvei 
behind the cannon of Fort St. George. 



MR. BURKE AND WARREN HASTINGS. 191 

There were the means indeed of forming an 
army which might have defended the presidency, 
and even driven the invader back to his mountains. 
Sir Hector Munro was at the head of one consi- 
derable force ; BailHe was advancing with another. 
United, they might have presented a formidable 
front even to such an enemy as Hyder. But the 
English commanders, forgetting those fundamental 
rules of the military art, of which the propriety is 
obvious even to men who have never received a 
military education, deferred their junction, and 
were separately attacked. Baillie's detachment 
wa^destroyed. Munro was forced to abandon his 
baggage, to fling his guns into the tanks, and to 
save himself by a retreat which might be called a 
flight. In three weeks from the commencement of 
the war, the British empire in southern India had 
been brought to the verge of ruin. Only a few 
fortified places remained to us. The glory of our 
arms had departed. It was known that a great 
French expedition might soon be expected on the 
coast of Coromandel. England, beset by enemies 
on every side, was in no condition to protect such 
remote dependencies. 

MR. BURKE AND WARREN HASTINGS.. 

• The zeal of Burke was still fiercer ; but it was 
far purer. Men unable to understand the elevation 
of his mind, have tried to find out some discredit- 
able motive for the vehemence and pertinacity 
which he showed on this occasion. But they have 
altogether failed. The idle story that he had some 



192 macaulay's miscellanies. 

private slight to revenge, Ifas long been given up, 
even by the advocates of Hastings. Mr. Gleig sup- 
poses that Burke was actuated by party spirit, that 
he retained a bitter remembrance of the fall of the 
coalition, that he attributed that fall to the exer- 
tions of the East India interest, and that he consi- 
dered Hastings as the head and the personification 
of that interest. This explanation seems to be suf- 
ficiently refuted by a reference to dates. The hos- 
tility of Burke to Hastings commenced long before 
the coalition ; and lasted long after Burke had be- 
come a strenuous supporter of those by v^^hom the 
coalition had been defeated. It bega'n when Bujrke 
and Fox, closely ahied together, were attacking the 
influence of the crown, and calling for peace with 
the American republic. It continued till Burke, 
alienated from Fox, and loaded with the favors of 
the crown, died, preaching a crusade against the 
French republic. It seems absurd to attribute to 
the events of 1784 an enmity which began in 1781, 
and which retained undiminished force long after 
persons far more deeply implicated than Hastings 
in the events of 1784, had been cordially forgiven. 
And why should we look for any other explanation 
of Burke's conduct than that which we find on the 
surface 1 The plain truth is, that Hastings had 
committed some great crimes, and that the thought 
of those crimes made the blood of Burke boil in his 
veins ; for Burke was a man in whom compassion 
for suffering, and hatred of injustice and tyranny, 
were as strong as in Las Casas, or Clarkson. And 
although in him, as in Las Casas, and in Clarkson, 
these nobles feelings were alloyed with the infirmity 



M. BURKE AND WARREN HASTINGS. 193 

wliicli belongs to human nature, he is, like them en- 
titled to this great praise, that he devoted years of 
intense labor to the service of a people vv^ith whom 
he had neither blood nor language, neither religion 
nor manners in common; and from whom no re- 
quital, no thanks, no applause could be expected. 
His knowledge of India was such as few, even of 
those Europeans who have passed many years in 
that country, have attained ; and such as certainly 
was never attained by any public man who had not 
quitted Europe. He had studied the history, the 
laws, and the usages of the East with an industry, 
such as is seldom found united to so much genius 
and so much sensibility. Others have perhaps been 
equally laborious, and have collected an equal mass 
of materials ; but the manner in which Burke brought 
his higher powers of intellect to work on statements 
of facts, and on tables of figures, was peculiar to 
himself In every part of those huge bales of In- 
dian information, which repelled almost all other 
readers, his mind, at once philosophical and poeti- 
cal, found something to instruct or to delight. His 
reason analysed and digested those vast and shape- 
less masses ; his imagination animated and colored 
them. Out of darkness, and dullness, and confusion, 
he drew a rich abundance of ingenious theories and 
vivid pictures. He had, in the highest degree, that 
noble faculty, whereby man is able to live in the 
past and in the future, in the distant and in the un- 
real. India and its inhabitants were not to him, as 
to most Englishmen, mere names and abstractions, 
but a real country and a real people. , The burning 
sun ; the strange vegetation of the palm and th» 



194 macaulay's miscellanies, 

cocoa-trees; the rice-field and the tank; the huge 
trees, older than the Mogul empire, under which 
the village crowds assemble ; the thatched roof of 
the peasant's hut, and the rich tracery of the mosque, 
where the imaum prayed with his face to Mecca; 
the drums, and banners, and gaudy idols ; the de- 
votee swinging in the air ; the graceful maiden, 
with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps 
to the river-side ; the black faces, the long beards, 
the yellow streaks of sect ; the turbans and the 
flowing robes ; the spears and the silver maces ; the 
elephants with their canopies of state; the gorgeous 
palankin of the prince, and the close litter of the 
noble lady — all those things were to him as the 
objects amid which his own life had been pass- 
ed — as the objects which lay on the road between 
Beaconsfield and St. James' Street. All India was 
present to the eye of his mind, from the halls where 
suitors laid gold and perfumes at the feet of sove- 
reigns, to the wild meor where the gipsy-camp was 
pitched — from the bazars, humming like bee-hives 
with the crowd of buyers and sellers, to the jungle 
where the lonely courier shakes his bunch of iron 
rings to scare away the hyaenas. He had just as 
lively an idea of the insurrection at Benares as of 
Lord George Gordon's riots, and of the execution 
of Nuncomar as of the execution of Dr. Dodd. Op- 
pression in Bengal was to him the same thing as 
oppression in the streets of London. 

He saw that Hastings had been guilty of some 
most unjustifiable acts. All that followed was na- 
tural and necessary in a mind like Burke's. His 
imagination and his passions, once excited, hurried 



M. BURKE AND WARREN HASTINGS. 195 

him beyond the bounds of justice and good sense. 
His reason, powerful as it was, was reduced to be 
the slave of feelings which it should have con- 
trolled. His indignation, virtuous in its origin, ac- 
quired too much of the character of personal aver- 
sion. He could see no mitigating circumstance, 
no redeeming merit. His temper, which, though 
generous and affectionate, had always been irritable, 
had now been almost savage by bodily infirmities 
and mental vexations. Conscious of great powers 
and great virtues, he found himself, in age and pov- 
erty, a mark for the hatred of a perfidious court, and 
a deluded people. In Parliament his eloquence 
was out of date. A young generation, which knev7 
him not, had filled the House. Whenever he rose 
to speak, his voice was drowned by the unseemly in- 
terruptions of lads, who were in their cradles when 
his orations on the Stamp Act called forth the ap- 
plause of the great Earl of Chatham. These things 
had produced on his pi'oud-^nd sensitive spirit an 
effect at which we cannot wonder. He could no 
longer discuss any question with calmness, or make 
allowances for honest difference of opinion. Those 
who think that he was more violent and acrimonious 
in debates about India than on other occasions, are 
ill-informed respecting the last years of his life. In 
the discussions on the Commercial Treaty with the 
court of Versailles, on the Regency, on the French 
Revolution, he showed even more virulence than in 
conducting the impeachment. Indeed it may be 
remarked, that the very persons who represented 
him as a mischievous maniac for condemning in 
burning words the Rohilla war, and the spoliation 



196 macaulay's miscellanies. 

of the Begums, exalted him into an inspired pro- 
phet as soon as he began to declaim, with greater 
vehemence, and not with greater reason, against the 
taking of the Bastile, and the insults offered to Ma- 
rie Antoinette. To us he appears to have been nei- 
ther a maniac in the former case, nor a prophet in 
the latter ; but in both cases a great and good man, 
led into extravagance by a tempestuous sensibility, 
which domineered over all his faculties. It may be 
doubted whether the personal antipathy of Francis, 
or the nobler indignation of Burke, would have led 
their party to adopt extreme measures against. Hast- 
ings, If his own conduct had been judicious. 

LAUD AND WENTWORTH. 

(earl STRAFFORD.) 

Never were faces more strikingly characteristic 
of the individuals to whom they belonged, than those 
of Laud and Strafford^ as they still remain portray- 
ed by the most skilful hand of that age. The mean 
forehead, the pinched features, the peering eyes of 
the prelate, suit admirably with his disposition. They 
mark him out as a lower kind of Saint Dominic, 
differing from the fierce and gloomy enthusiast who 
founded the Inquisition, as we might imagine the 
familiar imp of a spiteful witch to differ from an 
archangel of darkness. AVhen we read his judg- 
ments, when we read the report which he drew up, 
setting forth that he had sent some separatists to 
prison, and imploring the royal aid against others, 
we feel a movement of indignation. We turn to 
his Diary, and we are at once as cool as contempt 



LAUD AND WENTWORTH. 197 

can make us. There we read how his picture fell 
down, and how fearful he was lest the fall should be 
an omen ; how he dreamed that the Duke of Buck- 
ingham came to bed to him ; that King James walk- 
ed past him ; that he saw Thomas Flaxage in green 
garments, and the Bishop of Worcester with his 
shoulders wrapped in linen. In the early part of 
1627, the sleep of this great ornament of the church 
seems to have been much disturbed. On the oth of 
January, he saw a merry old man with a wrinkled 
countenance, named Grove, lying on the ground. On 
the 14th of the same memorable month, he saw the 
Bishop of Lincoln jump on a horse and ride away, 
A day or two after this, he dreamed that he gave 
the king drink in a silver cup, and that the king re- 
fused it, and called for a glass. Then he dreamed 
that he had turned papist — of all his dreams the only 
one, we suspect, which came through the gate of 
horn. But of these visions, our favorite is that 
which, as he has recorded, h^ enjoyed on the night 
of Friday the 9th of February, 1627. " I dreamed," 
says he, *' that I had the scurvy ; and that forthwith 
all my teeth became loose. There was one in es- 
pecial in my lower jaw, which I could scarcely keep 
in with my finger till I had called for help." Here 
was a man to have the superintendence of the opin- 
ions of a great nation ! 

But Wentworth — who ever names him without 
thinking of J»hose harsh dark features, ennobled by 
their expression into more than the majesty of an 
antique Jupiter; of that brow, that eye, that cheek, 
that lip, wherein, as in a chronicle, are written the 
events of many stormy and disastrous years ; high 



198 MACAtLAY's MISCELLANIES. 

enterprise accomplished, frightful dangers braved, 
power unsparingly exercised, suffering unshrinking- 
ly borne ; of that fixed look, so full of severity, of 
mournful anxiety ; of deep thought, of dauntless 
resolution, which seems at once to forebode and 
defy a terrible fate, as it lowers on us from the liv- 
ing canvass of Vandyke] Even at this day the 
haughty earl overawes posterity as he overawed his 
contemporaries, and excites the same interest when 
arraigned before the tribunal of history, which he 
excited at the bar of the House of Lords. In spite 
of ourselves, we sometimes feel toward his memory 
a certain relenting, similar to that relenting which 
his defence, as Sir John Denham tells us, produced 
in Westminister Hall. This great, brave, bad man 
entered the House of Commons at the same time 
with Hampden, and took the same side with Hamp- 
den. Both were among the richest and most power- 
ful commoners in the kingdom. Both were equally 
distinguished by force of character and by personal 
courage. Hampden had more judgment and saga- 
city than Went worth. But no orator of that time 
equalled Wentworth in force and brilliancy of ex- 
pression. In 1626, both these eminent men were 
committed to prison by the King ; Wentworth, who 
was among the leaders of the opposition, on account 
of his parliamentary conduct ; Hampden, who had 
not as yet taken a prominent part in debate, for re- 
fusing to pay taxes illegally imposed. 

Here their paths separated. After the death of 
Buckingham, the king attempted to seduce some of 
the chiefs of the opposition from their party ; and 
Wentworth was among those who yielded to the 



, LAUD AND WENtWORtH. 199 

seduction. He abandoned his associates, and hated 
them ever after with the deadly hatred of a rene- 
gade. High titles and great employments were 
heaped upon him. He became Earl of Strafford, 
Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, President of the Coun- 
cil of the North ; and he employed all his power for 
the purpose of crushing those liberties of which he 
had been the most distinguished champion. His 
counsels respecting public affairs were fierce and 
arbitrary. His correspondence with Laud abun- 
dantly proves that government without parliaments, 
government by the sword, was his favorite scheme. 
He was unwilling even that the course of justice be- 
tween man and man should be unrestrained by the 
royal perogative. He grudged to the Courts of 
King's Bench and Common Pleas even that mea- 
sure of liberty, w^hich the most absolute of the Bour- 
bons have allowed to the Parliaments of France. 

In Ireland, where he stood in the plafce of the 
king, his practice was in strict accordance with his 
theory. He set up the authority of the executive 
government over that of the courts of law. He per- 
mitted no person to leave the island without his li- 
cense. He established vast monopolies for his own 
private benefit. He imposed taxes arbitrarily. He 
levied them by miHtary force. Some of his acts are 
described even by the partial Clarendon as power- 
ful acts — acts which marked a nature excessively 
imperious — acts which caused dislike and terror in 
sober and dispassionate persons — high acts of op- 
pression. Upon a most frivolous charge, he obtained 
a capital sentence from a court-martial against a man 
of high rank who had given him offence. He de- 



200 macaulay's miscellanies. 

baucbed the daughter-in-law of the Lord Chancel- 
lor of Ireland, and then commanded that nobleman 
to settle his estate according to the wishes of the 
lady. The Chancellor refused. The Lord-Lieu- 
tenant turned him out of office, and threw him into 
prison. When the violent acts of the Long Parlia- 
ment are blamed, let it not be forgotten from what 
a tyranny they rescued the nation. 

■DEATH OF HAMPDEN, 

In the evening of the 17th of June, Rupert dart- 
ed out of Oxford with his cavalry on a predatory 
expedition. At three in the morning of the follow- 
ing day, he attacked and dispersed a few parliament- 
ary soldiers who were quartered at Postcombe. He 
then flew to Chinnor, burned the village, killed or 
took all the troops posted there, and prepared to 
hurry bdck v/ith his booty and his prisoners to 
Oxford. 

Hampden had, on the preceding day, strongly re- 
presented to Essex, the danger to which this part 
of the line was exposed. As soon as he received 
intelligence of Rupert's incursions, he sent off a 
horseman with a message to the General. The 
cavaliers, he said, could return only by Chiselhamp- 
ton Bridge. A force ought to be instantly des- 
patched in that direction, for the purpose of inter- 
cepting them. In the meantime, he resolved to set 
out with all the cavalry that he could muster, for the 
purpose of impeding the march of the enemy till 
Essex could take measures for cutting off their re- 
treat, A considerable body of horse and dragoons 



£>EATH OF HAMPDEN. 201 

volunteered to follow him. He was not their com- 
mander. He did not even belong to their branch 
of the service. But "he was," says Lord Clarendon, 
" second to none but the General himself in the ob- 
servance and application of all men." On the field 
of Chalgrove he came up with Rupert. A fierce 
■kirmish ensued. In the first charge, Hampden was 
struck in the shoulder by two bullets, which brok^ 
the bone, and lodged in his body. The troops of 
the Parliament lost heart and gave way. Rupert, 
after pursuing them for a short time, hastened to 
cross the bridge, and made his retreat unmolested 
to Oxford. 

Hampden, with his head drooping, and his hands 
leaning on his horse's neck, moved feebly out of the 
battle. The mansion which had been inhabited by his 
father-in-law, and from which in his youth he had 
carried home his bride, Elizabeth, was in sight. 
There still remains an affecting tradition, that he 
looked for a moment toward that beloved house, and 
made an effort to go thither to die. But the enemy 
lay in that direction. He turned his horse toward 
Thame, where he arrived almost fainting with ago- 
ny. The surgeons dressed his wounds. But there 
was no hope. The pain which he suffered was most 
excruciating. But he endured it with admirable 
firmness and resio^nation. His first care was for his 
country. He wrote from his bed several letters to 
London- concerning pubHc affairs, and sent a last 
pressing message to the headquarters, recommend- 
ing that the dispersed forces should be concentrated. 
When his last pubHc duties wer<3 jierformed, he 
calmly prepared himself to die. He was attended 



202 macaulay's miscellanies. 

by a clergyman of the Church of England, with 
whom he had lived in habits of intimacy, and by 
the chaplain of the Buckinghamshire Green-coats, 
Dr. Spurton, whom Baxter describes as a famous 
and excellent divine. 

A short time before his death, the sacrament was 
administered to him. He declared that, though he 
disliked the government of the Church of England, 
he yet agreed with that Church as to all essential 
matters of doctrine. His intellect remained un- 
clouded. When all was nearly over, he lay mur- 
muring faint prayers for himself, and for the cause 
in which he died. " Lord Jesu5," he exclaimed, in 
the moment of the last agony, " receive my soul — 
O Lord, save my country — O Lord, be merciful 

to ." In that broken ejaculation passed away 

his noble and fearless spirit. 

He was buried in the parish church of Hampden. 
His soldiers, bareheaded, with reversed arms, and 
muffled drums, and colors, escorted his body to the 
grave, singing, as they marched, that lofty and me- 
lancholy psalm, in which the fragility of human life 
is contrasted with the immutability of Him, in whose 
sight a thousand years are but as yesterday when it 
is passed, and as a watch in the night. 

The news of Hampden's death produced as great 
a consternation in his party, according to Clarendon, 
as if their whole army had been cut off. The jour- 
nals of the time amply prove that the Parliament 
and all its friends were filled with grief and dismay. 
Lord Nugent has quoted a remarkable passage from 
the next Weekly Intelligencer. " The loss of Colonel 
Hampden goeth near the heart of every man that 



DEATH OP HAMPDEN. 208 

loves the good of his king and country, and makes 
some conceive little content to be at the army now 
that he is gone. The memory of this deceased 
colonel is such, that in no age to come but it will 
more and more be had in honor and esteem; — a 
man so religious, and of that prudence, judgment, 
temper, valor and integrity, that he hath left few 
his like behind him." 

He had indeed left none his like behind him. 
There still remained, indeed, in his party, many 
acute intellects, many eloquent tongues, many brave 
and honest hearts. There still remained a rugged 
and clownish soldier, half-fanatic, half-buffoon, whose 
talents, discerned as yet only by one penetrating 
eye, were equal to all the highest duties of the 
soldier and the prince. But in Hampden, and in 
Hampden alone, were united all the qualities which 
at such a crisis, were necessary to save the state— 
the valor and energy of Cromwell, the discernment 
and eloquence of Vane, the humanity and modera- 
tion of Manchester, the stern integrity of Hale, the 
ardent public spirit of Sidney. Others might pos- 
sess the qualities which were necessary to save the 
popular party in the crisis of danger ; he alone had 
both the power and the inclination to restrain its 
excesses in the hour of triumph. Others could con- 
quer ; he alone could reconcile. A heart as bold as 
his brought up the cuirassiers who turned the tide 
of battle on Marston Moor. As skilful an eye as 
his watched the Scotch army descending from the 
heights over Dunbar. But it was when, to the sul- 
len tyranny of Laud and Charles, had succeeded 
the fierce conflict of sects and factions, ambitious 



204 macaulay's miscellanies. 

of ascendancy and burning for revenge ; it was 
when the vices and ignorance which the old tyran- 
ny had generated, threatened the new freedom with 
destruction, that England missed that sobriety, that 
self-com.mand, that peifect soundness of judgment, 
that perfect rectitude of intention, to which the his- 
tory of revolutions furnishes no parallel, or furnishes 
a parallel in Washington alone. 

NARES' MEMOIRS OF LORD BURGHLEY. 

The work of Doctor Nares has filled us with as- 
tonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel 
Gulliver felt, when first he landed in Brobdignag, 
and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Fo- 
rest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the 
bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every com- 
ponent part of it, is on a gigantic scale. The title 
is as long as an ordinary preface. The prefatory 
matter would furnish out an ordinary book; and the 
book contains as much reading as an ordinary libra- 
ry. We cannot Sum up the merits of the stupen- 
dous mass of paper which lies before us, better than 
by saying, that it consists of about two thousand 
closely printed pages, that it occupies fifteen hun- 
dred inches cubic measure, and that it weighs sixty 
pounds avoirdupois. Such a book might, before the 
deluge, have been considered as light reading by 
Hilpa and Shallum. But unhappily the life of man 
is now threescore years and ten ; and we cannot 
but think it somewhat unfair in Doctor Nares to 
demand from us so large a portion of so short an 
existence. 

• Prime minister of Queen Elizabeth. 



NARES MEMOIRS OF LORD BURGHLEY. 205 

Compared witli the labor of reading through 
these volumes, all other labors — tlie labor of thieves 
on the tread-mill, of children in factories, of negroes 
in sugar plantations — is an agreeable recreation. 
There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy, who was 
suffered to make his choice between G-uicciardini 
and the galleys. He chose the history. But the 
war of Pisa was too much for him. He changed 
his mind, and went to the oar. Guicciardini, though 
certainly not the most amusing. of writers, is a He- 
rodotus, or a Froissart, when compared with Doctor 
Nares. It is not merely in bulk, but in specific 
gravity also, that these memoirs exceed all other 
human compositions. On every subject which the 
professor discusses, he produces three times as ma- 
ny pages as another man ; and one of his pages is 
as tedious as another man's three. *His book is 
swelled to its vast dimensions by endless repetitions, 
by episodes which have nothing to do with the main 
action, by quotations from books which are in every 
circulating Hbrary, and by reflections which, when 
they happen to be just, are so obvious that they 
must necessarily occur to the mind of every reader. 
He employs more words in expounding and defend- 
ing a truism, than any other writer would employ 
in supporting a paradox. Of the rules of historical 
perspective he has not the faintest notion. There is 
neither foreground nor background in his delinea- 
tion. The wars of Charles the Fifth in Germany 
are detailed at almost as much length as in Robert- 
son's Life of that prince. The troubles of Scotland 
are related as fully as in M'Crie's Life of John 
Knox. It would be most unjust to deny that Doc- 



206 macaulay's miscellanies. 

tor Nares is a man of gr^at industry and research ; 
but be is so utterly incompetent to arrange the ma- 
terials wbich be bas collected, tbat be migbt as well 
have left tbem in tbeir original repositories. 

Neither the facts which Doctor Nares bas discov- 
ered, nor the arguments which he urges, will, we 
apprehend, materially alter the' opinion generally 
entertained by judicious readers of history concern- 
ing his hero.. Lord Burgbley can hardly be called 
a great man. He was not one of those whose ge- 
nius and energy change the fate of empires. He 
was by nature and habit one of those who follow, 
not one of those who lead. Nothing that is re- 
corded, either of bis words or of bis actions, indicates 
intellectual or moral elevation. But bis talents, 
though not brilliant, were of an eminently useful 
kind ; and bis principles, though not inflexible, 
were not more relaxed than those of his associates 
and competitors. He bad a cool temper, a sound 
judgment, great powers of application, and a con- 
stant eye to the main chance. In his youth be was, 
it seems, fond of practical jokes. Yet even out of 
these he contrived to extract some pecuniary profit. 
When be was studying the law at Gray's Inn, be 
lost all bis furniture and books to bis companion at 
the gaming-table. He accordingly bored a hole in 
the wall which separated bis chambers from those 
of bis associate, and at midnight bellowed through 
this passage threats of damnation, and calls to re- 
pentance in the ears of the victorious gambler, who 
lay sweating with fear all night, and refunded his 
winnings on bis knees next day. " Many other the 
like merry jests," says bis old biographer, " I have 



NARES' MEMOIRS OF LORD BURGHLEY. 207 

heard him tell, too long to be here noted." To the 
last, Burghley was somewhat jocose ; and some of 
his sportive sayings have been recorded by Bacon. 
They show much more shrewdness than generosity; 
and are, indeed, neatly expressed reasons for exact- 
ing money rigorously, and for keeping it carefully. 
It must, however, be acknowledged, that he was 
rigorous and careful for the public advantage, as 
well as for his own. To extol his moral character, 
as Doctor Nares has extolled it, would be absurd. 
It would be equally absurd to represent him as a 
corrupt, rapacious, and bad-hearted man. He paid 
great attention to the interest of the state, and great 
attention also to the interest of his own family. He 
never deserted his friends till it was very inconve- 
nient to stand by them ; he was an excellent Pro- 
testant when it was not very advantageous to be a 
Papist ; recommended a tolerant policy to his mis- 
tress as strongly as he could recommend it without 
hazarding her favor ; never put to the rack any per- 
son from whom it did not seem probable that very 
useful information might be derived ; and was so 
moderate in his desires, that he left only three hun- 
dred distinct landed estates, though he might, as his 
honest servant assures us, have left much more, " if 
he would have taken money out of the Exchequer 
for his own use, as many treasurers have done." 

We had intended to say something concerning 
the dexterous Walsingham, the impetuous Oxford, 
the elegant Sackville, the all-accomplished Sidney; 
concerning Essex, the ornament of the court and 
of the camp, the model of chivalry, the munificent 
patron of genius, whom great virtues, great cour- 



208 macaulay's miscellanies. 

age, great talents, the favor of liis sovereign, the 
love of bis countrymen — all that seemed to insure a 
happy and glorious life, led to an early and an ig- 
nominious death ; concerning Raleigh, the soldier, 
the sailor, the scliolar, the courtier, the orator, the 
poet, the historian, the philosopher, sometimes re- 
viewing the Queen's guards, sometimes giving 
chase to a Spanish galleon, then answering the 
chiefs of the country party in the House of Com- 
mons, then again murmuring one of his sweet love- 
songs too near the ears of her Highness' maids of 
honor, and soon after poring over the Talmud, or 
collating Polybius with Livy. We had intended 
also to say something concerning the literature of 
that splendid period, and especially concerning those 
two incomparable men, the Prince of Poets, and the 
Prince of Philosophers, who have made the .Eliza- 
bethan age a more glorious and important era in the 
histoiy of the human mind, than the age of Pericles, 
of Augustus, or of Leo. But subjects so vast require 
a space far larger than we can at present afford. 
We therefore stop here, fearing that, if we proceed, 
our article may swell to a bulk exceeding that of all 
other reviews, as much as Doctor Nares' book ex- 
xeeds the bulk of all other histories. 

THE ELDER MR. PITT IN PARLIAMENT. 

• 

In April, 1736, Frederic was married to the Prin- 
cess of Saxe-Gotha, with whom he afterwards lived 
on terms very similar to those on which his father 
nad lived with Queen Caroline. The Prince adored 
nis wife, and thought her in mind and person the 



PITT IN PARLIAMENT. 209 

• 

most attractive of her sex. But he thought that 
conjugal fidelity was an unprincely virtue ; and, in 
order to be like Henry the Fourth, and the Regent 
Orleans, he affected a libertinism for which he had 
no taste, and frequently quitted the only woman 
whom he loved for ugly and disagreeable mistresses. 
The address which the House of Commons pre- 
sented to the Iving on occasion of the Prince's mar- 
riage, was moved, not by the minister, but by Pul- 
teney, the leader of the Whigs in Opposition. It 
was on this motion that Pitt, who had not broken 
silence during the session in which he took his seat, 
addressed the House for the first time. "A contem- 
porary historian," says Mr. Thackeray, "describes 
Mr. Pitt's first speech as superior even to the mo- 
dels of ancient eloquence. According to Tindal, it 
was more ornamented than the speeches of Demos- 
thenes, and less diffuse than those of Cicero." This 
unmeaning phrase has been a hundred times quoted. 
That it should ever have been quoted, except to be 
laughed at, is strange. The vogue which it has ob- 
tained, may serve to show in how slovenly a way 
most people are content to think. Did Tindal, who 
first used it, or Archdeacon Coxe, or Mr. Thackeray, 
who have borrowed it, ever in their lives hear any 
speaking which did not deserve the same compli- 
ment] Did they ever hear speaking less ornament- 
ed than that of Demosthenes, or more diffuse than 
that of Cicero] We know no living orator, from 
Lord Brougham down to Mr. Hunt, who is not enti- 
tled to the same magnificent eulogy. It would be no 
very flattering compliment to a man's figure to say, 
that he was taller than the Polish Count, and short- 



210 macaulay's miscellanies. 

er than Giant O'Brien ; — fatter than the Jlnatomie 
Vivante, and more slender than Daniel Lambert. 

Pitt's speech, as it is reported in the Gentleman's 
Magazine, certainly deserves Tindal's compliment, 
and deserves no other. It is just as empty and 
wordy as a maiden speech on such an occasion might 
be expected to be. But the fluency and the person- 
al advantages of the young orator instantly caught 
the ear and eye of his audience. He was, from the 
day of his first appearance, always heard with atten- 
tion ; and exercise soon developed the great powers 
which he possessed. 

In our time, the audience of a member of parlia- 
ment is the nation. The three or four hundred 
persons who may be present while a speech is de- 
livered, may be pleased or disgusted by the voice 
and action of the orator ; but in the reports which 
are read the next day by hundreds of thousands, the 
difference between the noblest and the meanest fig- 
ure, between the richest and the shrillest tones, be- 
tween the most graceful and the most uncouth ges- 
ture, altogether vanishes. A hundred years ago, 
scarcely any report of what passed within the walls of 
the House of Commons was suffered to get abroad. In 
those times, therefore, the impression which a speak- 
er might make on the persons who actually heard him 
was everything. The impression out of doors was 
hardly worth a thought. In the parliaments of that 
tizne, therefore, as in the ancient commonwealths, 
those qualifications which enhance the immediate 
effect of a speech, v/ere far more important ingre- 
dients in the composition of an oiator than they 
would appear to be in our time. All those qualifi- 



MR. PITT IN PARLIAMENT. !J11 

cations Pitt possessed in the highest degree. On 
the stage, he would have been the finest Brutus 
or Coriolanus ever seen. Those who saw him in 
his decay, when his health was broken, when his 
mind was jangled, when he had been removed from 
that stormy assembly of which he thoroughly knew 
the temper, and over which he possessed unbound- 
ed influence, to a small, a torpid, and an unfriendly 
audience, say that his speaking was then, for the 
most part, a low, monotonous muttering, audible 
only to those who sat close to him — that, when vio- 
lently excited, he sometimes raised his voice for a 
few minutes, but that it soon sank again into an un- 
intelligible murmur. Such was the Earl of Chat- 
ham ; but such was not William Pitt. Plis figure, 
when he first appeared in Parliament, was striking- 
ly graceful and commanding, his features high and 
noble, his eye full of fire. His voice, even when it 
sank to a whisper, was heard to the remotest bench- 
es ; when he strained it to its full extent, the sound 
rose like the swell of the organ of a great cathedral, 
shook the house with its peal, and was heard through 
lobbies and down staircases, to the Court of Requests 
and the precincts of Westminster liall. Pie cultivat- 
ed all these eminent advantages with the most assidu- 
ous care. His action is described by a yery mafig- 
nant observer as equal to that of Garrick. His play 
of countenance was wonderful ; he frequently dis- 
concerted a hostile orator by a single glance of in- 
dignation or scorn. Every tone, from the impas- 
sioned cry to the thrilling aside, was perfectly at his 
command. It is by no means improbable that the 
pains which he took to improve his great personal 



212 macaulay's Miscellanies. 

advantages had, in some respects, a prejudicial op* 
eration, and tended to nourish in him that passion 
for theatrical effect, which, as we have already re- 
marked, was one of the most conspicuous blemishes 
in his character. 

But it was not solely or principally to outward 
accomplishments that Pitt owed the vast influence 
which, during nearly thirty years, he exercised over 
the House of Commons. He was undoubtedly a 
great orator ; and, from the descriptions of his con- 
temporaries, and the fragments of his speeches 
which still remain, it is not diflacult to discover the 
nature and extent of his oratorical powers. 

He was no speaker of set speeches. His few 
prepared discourses were complete failures. The 
elaborate panegyric which he pronounced on Gen- 
ral Wolfe was considered as the very worst of all 
his performances. " No man," says a critic who 
had often heard him, " ever knew so little what he 
was going to say." Indeed his facility amounted to 
a vice. He was not the master, but the slave of his 
own speech. So little self-command had he when 
once he felt the impulse, that he did not like to 
take part in a debate when his mind was full of an 
important secret of state. " I must sit still," he once 
said to Lord Shelburne on such an occasion ; " for 
when once I am up, every thing that is in my mind 
comes out." 

Yet he was not a great debater. That he should 
not have been so when first he entered the House 
of Commons is not strange. Scarcely any person 
had ever become so without long practice, and ma- 
ny failures. It was by slow degrees, as Burke said, 



MR. PITT IN PARLIAMENT. 213 

that the late Mr. Fox became the most brilliant and 
powerful debater that ever Parliament saw. Mr. 
Fox himself attributed his own success to the reso- 
lution which he formed when very young, of speak- 
ing, well or ill, at least once every night. "During 
five whole sessions," he used to say, *'I spoke every 
night but one, and I regret only that I did not speak 
on that night too." Indeed it would be difficult to 
name any great debater, except Mr. Stanley, whose 
knowledge of the science of parliamentary defence 
resembles an instinct, who has not made himself a 
master of his art at the expense of his audience. 

But as this art is one which even the ablest men 
have seldom acquired without long practice, so it is 
one which men of respectable abilities, with assi- 
duous and intrepid practice, seldom fail to acquire. 
It is singular that in such an art, Pitt, a man of 
splendid talents, of gTeat fluency, of great boldness 
— a man whose whole life was passed in parlia- 
mentary conflict — a man who, during several years, 
was the leading minister of the Crown in the House 
of Commons — should never have attained to high 
excellence. He spoke without premeditation ; but 
his speech followed the course of his own thoughts, 
and not the course of the previous discussion. He 
could, indeed, treasure up in his memory some de- 
tached exj)ression of a hostile orator, and make it 
the text for sparkling lidicule or burning invective. 
Some of the most celebrated bursts of his eloquence 
were called forth by an unguarded word, a laugh 
or a cheer. But this was the only sort of reply ia 
which he appears to have excelled. He was per- 
haps the only great English orator who did not 



214 macaulay's miscellanies. 

think it any advantage to have the last word : and 
who generally spoke by choice before his most for- 
midable opponents. His merit was almost entirely 
rhetorical. He did not succeed either in expositi 
or in refutation ; but his speeches abounded witn 
lively illustrations', striking apophthegms, well-told 
anecdotes, happy allusions, passionate appeals. His 
invective and sarcasm were tremendous. Perhaps 
no English orator was ever so much feared. 

But that which gave most effect to his declama- 
tion, was the air of sincerity, of vehement feeling, of 
moral elevation, which belonged to all that he said. 
His style was not always in the purest taste. Seve- 
ral contemporary judges pronounced it too florid. 
Walpole, in the midst of the rapturous eulogy which 
he pronounces on one of Pitt's greatest orations, 
owns that some of the metaphors were too forced. 
The quotations and classical stones of the great ora- 
tor are sometimes too trite for a clever schoolboy. 
But these were niceties for which the audience 
cared little. The enthusiasm of the orator infected 
all who were near him ; his ardor and his noble 
bearing put fire into the most frigid conceit, and 
gave dignity to the most puerile allusion. 



THE END. 



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